Romantic App 2.0

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Inside the Colosseum (1818-1828)

Franz Ludwig Catel (1778-1856)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | Life in Nowhere

When Georges-Eugène Haussmann rebuilt Paris, all the old alleyways and narrow streets were destroyed. Animistic Spirits living in such alleyways were evicted out of their homes. Dispossessed, they took up residence in romantic paintings, squatting in the works of arts, forever yearning for where their lives breathed, struggled, and dreamed.

This project comes from an idea I dubbed “animism of space”: The spaces we inhabit have spirits of their own. Baudelaire expresses the idea in his poem, The Swan. A swan is freed from a cage. It walks on the new Paris’ dry pavements. It yearns for water just as Baudelaire longs for old Paris. If Where life breathed and struggled and dreamed is gone, the life is gone with it. In the poet’s mind, The alleyways live, and the swan is the spirit of the old alleys.

Spirit of life became a central concept in examining space during the Romantic movement in the 19th century. Landscapes grew into a more direct expression of the relationship between the dweller and the dwelling. Optics, intuition, and iconographic contemplation became a language constructing the dream space in which human minds live. These languages far reached beyond their time of birth as we still depend on them in making virtual and augmented spaces. It is altogether fitting that these creatures squat in augmented planes inside Romantic landscapes.

Augmented space does not replace the physical. It starts where the physical becomes inhabitable by imagination. It is constructed with a goal to restore the forgotten; a refuge where human mind may dream. That dream, in this case, is to live.

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Italian Landscape (1821/1824)

Attributed to Heinrich Reinhold (1788-1825)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | Queens

Monarchs, now a thing of the past, have their last portrait painted, standing far from the realm they ruled.

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The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam (1834)

Carl Blechen (1798-184)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | A Captive Slave and a Sans-culottes

A garden is a colonized form of nature; one which makes its original dwellers become tools in human luxury. These two lament their sad fate as accessories and reminisces the days of the unconquered past.

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The Cloisters, San Lorenzo fuori le mura (1824)

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | Fourth Horseman

Horsemen are bringers of apocalypse. While many pious believed the material revolution of the 19th century will bring about the rapture, the horsemen never came.

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Entrance to the Park at Saint-Cloud (c.1802)

Jean Victor Bertin (1775-1842)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | Pied Piper and the Wild Hunt

Industrialization was a mesmerizing dream of human advance for some, and an utter destruction of the old way of life for others. The song it played was both that of salvation and apocalypse.

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Pregola with Oranges (1827)

by Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | Spirit Despairing in the Garden

A spirit mourns for the fate of all those dispossessed; lives and ideas alike. For she knows no one will.

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The Fountain at Grottaferrata (1832)

Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803-1884)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 221

Muyeol Choe BFA 2020 | The Onlooker

Spies became a part of normal life in the 19th century. They were everywhere; schools, churches, secret societies, and even in an innocent countryside.

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In the Heather (1896)

By Pierre Puvis de Chavannes  (French, 1824-1898)

European Painting and Sculpture (Currently Off View)

Cindy Cheng BFA 2021 | Intermission (2019)

Art is a subjective matter. It is all about the personal expressions of the artists. What we are looking at in the artworks, what is existing in the museum, are all produced and filtered with the thoughts and emotions of the artists. In this perspective, artworks itself are lenses, lenses which can lead the viewer into another virtual world which are artificially created by the artists.

My works here aim to focus on how, the artworks presented by those artists, are artificially constructed rather than a reflection of reality. We are looking at the virtual experience, spiritual expression, the emotions, the flow of thoughts, the working methods of the artist, rather than what they are looking at when they are painting the artwork. To emphasize the “artificiality,” I revealed the “behind the scenes” for this work, “In the Heather” by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He created this scene that is normally described as “dreamlike fantasies” or “nostalgia of the mythical past,” but reversely I am aiming to show how the construction of the artwork is staged and so different from how it looks. So I used hand drawn animations to animate the characters in the scene, as if they are taking a break from posing for the artist. 

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The Grand Muveran (1912)

By Ferdinand Hodler (Swiss, 1853 - 1918)

Modern Art Gallery 246

Cindy Cheng BFA 2021 | Illusion (2019)

The Grand Muveran by Ferdinand Hodler was known for its distinctive art style and symbolic expression. Instead of using the En Plein Air style which focuses on the reproduction of the subject, Hodler combined his symbolic perception into the landscape. In this sense, this artwork is artificially created since it is a reflection of the artist’s internal world rather than the reality. To emphasize the artificiality, I created the virtual “behind the scene” for this painting. I created 3D models of the “mountains,” outlining the shapes appearing in the painting, and layer them together. From the side, viewers will see panels of shapes stacking together, but in the front, the 3D objects are giving an illusion of the 2D painting. It also questions what is real and what is unreal in art.

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The Poet's Garden (1888)

By Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)

European Painting and Sculpture Gallery 241

Cindy Cheng BFA 2021 | Filters (2019)

In this work, I am trying to reflect on the consumer culture of shopping and selecting commodities. I used this painting because of its vibrant color scheme and bold brushwork. Van Gogh created this painting when he moved to Provence from Paris, and this painting was primarily inspired by the vibrant colors he saw in Provence. The colors look so beautiful, and at the same time so artificial. By creating different color versions of the painting, and giving the viewers the power to change them by tapping the screen, I want to create an experience similar to online shopping, where you can virtually try on the products, and eventually, you get lost in the colors and choices you have.

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Arrival of the Normandy, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877

By Claude Monet (1840-1926)

European Paintings and Sculpture

Passing by Normandy (2019)

Young Woo Kim BFA 2020

Paintings I chose have association with industrial revolutions. The main subjects of the paintings were products of amazing development of the time, such as steam engines and umbrellas. These inventions have been admired for their rapid and consecutive motion at the time, it is just obsolete antique in today’s perspective. Along side with that, the medium of the art makes hard to detect liveliness of these motions. I wanted to put life into paintings again using, one of the most newest technology, augmented reality in different kinds of ways. What can be better to revitalize old art form with scene of old technology with newest art form? Someday, when augmented reality becomes old form of art/tech some artist might rework my works with theirs.

 Instead of moving individuals or painted components, I chose to interfere with the settings of painting with different perspective. Arrival of the Normandy, Gare-Saint Lazare is in perspective of human waiting for the train in the station. When seeing the painting, viewers will assume motions in trains and people around them. However, I wanted to apply motion to the people who are watching this station full of people and trains. Instead of watching the moving crowd standing still, viewers get to experience motion in a perspective of people who are passing by station on a train. The GIF added on is part of the video took on the train looking out the window. The viewer is seeing a scene of painting through window of the train, which is cell phone screens of viewers. I also thought the main motion taking place in the painting was steam coming off the train, so I fixed GIF of steam moving to the painting.

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Sea View, Calm Weather (1864)

Edouad Manet (1832-1883)

Europen Painting and Sculpture Gallery 225

Break through (2019)

Young Woo Kim BFA 2020

Continuing from my earlier work with train, I chose the painting because of the steam boat. Along with train, steam boat was one of the ground breaking transportation after industrial revolution. Its speed and power was mesmerizing  and fascinating at that time. However, its activeness could not be fully captured inside still painting. Now using a new technology of these days I got to portray late grand technology more active and powerful.

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Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect (1903)

Claude Monet (1840~1926)

European Paintings and Sculpture 243 

Young Woo Kim’20 BFA 

Light (2019)

The scene of Waterloo Bridge seemed too calm and inactive to me.  Although painting tried to portray some kind of motion in itself. It is too subtle for us who are used to constant moving of cars and active factories. I created motion to the cars or whatever object on the bridge creating light trails, not only moving sideways but making them spread out all around like lights do.

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Trompe l’Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain (1658)

by Adriaen van der Spelt (Dutch, 1630-1673)

Frans van Mieris (Dutch, 1635-1681)

European Painting and Sculpture, Gallery 213

Xavier Hughes BFA 2021 | Tromper L’œil / Augmentée (2019)

Trompe-l'œil, as defined by Wikipedia is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Trompe-l'Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain created by Dutch painters Adriaen van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris is a prime example of this. What I hoped to achieve with this piece was to exemplify this idea with computer generated three dimensional simulations. I then manipulated the original painting to change over time, displaying portraits of the original painters within the painting after being revealed by the animated cloth. Trompe-l'œil is sort of a natural precursor to the idea of augmented reality. To implement virtual objects in our real world creates the illusion of a world that exists in parallel, which works in tandem with trompe-l'œil as a concept.

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Portrait of a Young Lady (1628/32)

by Paulus Moreelse (Dutch, 1571–1638)

European Painting and Sculpture, Gallery 212

Xavier Hughes BFA 2021 | Portrait of a Young Lady (2019)

Historically, portrait painting within European traditions acts as a form of documentation and an indication of status. I have replaced the image of this unknown person with an image of a woman with global cultural significance. I hope to critique and admire the tradition of portrait painting with this piece.

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The Captive Slave (1827)

by John Phillip Simpson (English, 1782-1847)

European Painting and Sculpture

Xavier Hughes BFA 2021 | Retrospective 1. (2019)

The Captive Slave by the English painter, John Simpson, is a hybrid between portrait and genre painting. It depicts a shackled, dark-skinned man, thought to be modeled by the American-born actor Ira Aldridge. The painting is an abolitionist statement. To complicate and propel this painting into an expanded conversation, I’ve reinterpreted the work by digitally collaging it with a portrait of an aristocratic woman by John Singer Sargent. The motif of “the enslaved” present in the original piece becomes less literal in a way and more contemplative of possibly an institutional enslavement; but also, the implied interaction between the male and female figures and the clear dichotomy of class presents a complexity that parallels the original sentiment of the painting.