Project Concept

Graffiti art is a vital component of Hong Kong's street culture, yet constrained by regulations and spatial limitations, this form of expression perpetually exists in marginal spaces, rarely noticed. Our capstone project aims to transform representative Hong Kong graffiti works into physical puzzle fragments. When viewers hold these missing graffiti pieces before a public screen's recognition camera, the system will automatically match them with corresponding digital graffiti animations. The static street art will then dynamically transform into interactive scenes featuring narrative-driven interactions with predefined IP characters. Each fragment also carries unique narrative clues, allowing audiences to assemble different graffiti modules across locations to unlock a complete urban graffiti story collection. Through this "seek-identify-activate" interactive storytelling process, Hong Kong's graffiti culture is technologically reimagined as preservable, shareable, and interactive cultural memory.

Honor

Social Media campaigns

IP Design

Exhibition on PolyU Design Show

Exhibition on Game for Change Expo

Exhibition on Shenzhen Animation Expo

Non-semantic Expressions in the City

In spite of the regular urban traces, there are also vague traces, such as the small adverts and graffiti on the streets that have been cleaned up or covered, and which turn out to be traces of disorder on the buildings. They are the exclusionary reaction of the established urban appearance to the culture of the citizens. They are the silent expression of the city itself, after the values that people attach to it have faded away.

Unsuppressible urban trace

The data show that the government cleans up urban traces everyday, but most of the urban traces reappear after they have been cleaned up, ad nauseam.

This vitality seems to correspond to the irrepressible desires and needs of urbanites.

People seem to be caught in a cycle of losing and finding.

Fluid Identities

People's subjectivities are formed and reshaped according to the roles assigned to them by society and their desire to invest in various networks (family, school, society).

Urban traces are in a freer context than symbols in formal public space, where the viewer can criticise, erase, praise and respond to the trace according to his or her own point of view. Thus, our identities are fluid with regard to urban traces, and we can become a viewer, a creator, or a purger at any time.

Urban Traces As a Language

Urban traces can be seen as the physical, visual and acoustic traces left behind by the city over time, which are different from written or spoken language, they have their own visual characteristics and ways of expression, and they can convey the thoughts, emotions, political and cultural views of the people in the city, at the same time represent the deepest spiritual needs of the citizens.

The connection between
self and the world

「1」Through their nomadism in the city, the viewers also connect their "selves" to the "world", linking themselves to urban images, culture, politics, art and even the inner world of the graffiti artist.

「2」Graffiti creators connect their "selves" to the "world" through the nomadism of graffiti, linking themselves to the series of images produced over time in the city and all the possibilities associated with them.