Unvarnished Story
Illustrations and Augmented Reality 2016-2017

Unvarnished Story is ten digital illustrations and ten interactive animations that balance the environmental, economic, sociological, and aesthetic dimensions of our landscape through strategic research and design. Chen designs illustrations based on rare historical photographs and news stories, then adds an interactive component through an augmented reality technique often used in displaying 3D games and animations. Viewers are presented with wall-mounted images that, when viewed through the screen of a digital tablet, are transformed into animations with alternative imagery and narration.

​Unvarnished Story was exhibited at the following venues:

• Faculty Focus Exhibition. Hand Art Center, Stetson University, FL. Jan. 20-Mar. 3, 2017
• 30th Annual McNeese National Works on Paper Exhibition. Grand Gallery, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA. Apr. 6-May. 12, 2017.
• PETS and PEOPLE Juried Exhibition. 311 Gallery, Raleigh, NC. June 1-July 1, 2017
• 30th September Competition Exhibition. Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA. Jun. 2-Sep. 23, 2017 (First Place Award Winner)
• Bright Summer Exhibition. Ralwins Art Gallery, Ellaville, GA. July 15-Aug. 31, 2017
• FL3TCH3R. 5th Annual International Juried Exhibition of Socially and Politically Engaged Art. Reece Museum, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN. Oct. 9 - Dec. 15, 2017
• Critical Concerns Exhibition. Janalyn Hanson White Gallery, Mount Mercy University, IA. Oct. 28 - Nov. 16, 2017
• Enlightenment Exhibition. LIT Art Gallery, Chattanooga, TN. Nov. 17 - Nov. 30, 2017
• Art Connections 13 Annual Juried Exhibition. George Segal Gallery, Montclair State University, NJ. Nov. 19-Dec. 16, 2017
• Art as Information Exhibition. The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE. Nov. 30, 2017 – Feb. 1, 2018
• Holiday Small Works Exhibition. Limner Gallery, Hudson, NY. Dec. 2 - Dec. 30, 2017
• The 7th Annual National Juried Exhibition. Carroll Gallery at the Visual Arts Center, Marshall University, Huntington, WV. Jan. 8 - Feb. 16, 2018 (Second Place Award Winner)
• The 9th Annual Drawing Discourse International Exhibition. S. Tucker Cooke Gallery, University of North Carolina Asheville, NC. Jan. 19 - Feb. 23, 2018
• The 39th Annual Paper In Particular Exhibition. Sidney Larson Gallery, Columbia College, Columbia, MO. Feb. 19- Mar. 30, 2018
• 10th Annual National Juried Exhibition. Willard Arts Center, 498 A Street, Idaho Falls, ID. Mar. 15 - Jun. 3, 2018
• The Anniversary Art Exhibition. Ralwins Art Gallery, Ellaville, GA. Apr. 7 - May. 30, 2018
• Dengke Chen Solo Exhibition – Humanimal Kingdom. North Charleston City Gallery, Cultural Arts Department, North Charleston, SC. Sep. 6- 28, 2018
• The Last Image Show. Tanganyika National Library, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Sep. 11- 23, 2018
• Dengke Chen, Goran Fazil, and Aaron Oldenburg: In Play, Flow, and Ritual. King Street Gallery, Montgomery College, Takoma Park, MD. Sep. 17 - Oct. 12, 2018
• ‘CITY UNSEEN’. Snap! Space, Orlando, FL. Nov. 02, 2018-Jan. 12, 2019
• Dengke Chen Solo Exhibition - Reframing Imagery. The Fine Arts Gallery, the College of Southern Nevada, North Las Vegas, NV. Nov. 2 - Dec. 7, 2019
• [create]ures: Animals in Contemporary Art. Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, SC. Nov. 21, 2019 - Feb. 9, 2020
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​Unvarnished Story - list of illustrations and animations
 
Segregated Water Fountains,  2016-17
Tank Man, 2016-17
Lunchtime Atop a Skyscraper, 2016-17
The Refugee, 2016-17
The Bus, 2016-17
Survivor of a Death Camp, 2016-17
The Funeral, 2016-17
Baby on the Beach, 2016-17
The Forest Girl, 2016-17
The Falling Man, 2016-17
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Unvarnished Story - Concept Note
Dengke Chen's augmented reality piece Unvarnished Story shows the physical and metaphor co-layers of the sounds of silence in our society. Who's in control? The dictator who controlling and censoring the media, and building a wall of silence? The authorities who following an intentional effort to erase the current existence of indigenous tribes and mute their perspective on public policy and current events such as the pipeline projects? The corporate hands controlling the police and the public? The developer's excavator destroying historical places? The consumers who ignoring the consequences and by-products of industrialization such as air pollution and global warming? Using the lens and screen, Chen forces the audience to interact and confront these notions.

1. Title: Segregated Water Fountains
Year: 2016
Video documentation: https://youtu.be/_6V4o9KcSis

The Segregated Water Fountains represents the injustice of treatment to animals. The ‘pet’ water fountain is visibly more luxurious than the ‘food animals’. We can therefore see straight away that the image is simply evidence of controversial inequality. Humans segregate animals into groups for sentimental reasons and consumption purposes and ignore the fact that all are living creatures that share existence with human beings and deserve to be free. This has a metaphorical similarity that reminds us of the segregation of black and white people in America during the 1950s. Injustices still exist in our society today and are especially apparent in criminal trials. The augmented reality animation of Segregated Water Fountains expands the metaphor to a broader topic by showing the prejudice on the external figure that caused a grey color humanoid character wearing a "police skin coat" to pull the trigger and shoot another grey color humanoid character who wears a "black skin sport suit", despite the fact that their internal characteristics are all the same. The audio was extracted from BBC news St Louis: Unrest after police killing of teenager, to give the audience more context to the reality.
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2. Title: Tank Man
Year: 2016
Video documentation: https://youtu.be/nKxOycGEQ68

The illustration Tank Man was created based on an iconic photo Tank Man of Tiananmen, taken by Jeff Widener. The tank man is a lone man who stepped in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the huge protest was suppressed with deaths of hundreds of people. Almost 30 years after the incident, the identity and fate of the man remain unclear, but he instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide. In the illustration, Chen replaced the tanks with excavators, since it is a common tool that authority used to pull down civilian's homes without any acknowledgment. The bunny who lives at the bottom of the food chain is a symbol of the vulnerable civilian, and the dogs with camouflage clothing are a symbol of authority. The augmented reality animation of Tank Man expands the metaphor to a broader topic by showing a group of humanoid characters wearing a "police skin coat" and a "camouflage skin coat" pulling down houses of a few unclothed humanoid characters, despite the fact that their internal characteristics are all the same. The audio was extracted from BBC news Chinese troops fire on protesters in Tiananmen Square, to give the audience more context to the reality.
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3. Title: Lunchtime Atop a Skyscraper
Year: 2016
Video documentation: ​https://youtu.be/KpDq5YpzlLw

The illustration Lunchtime Atop a Skyscraper was inspired by Charles C. Ebbets's photo Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam), a famous black-and-white photograph taken during construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York City, United States. In the illustration, I replaced the human workers with animals and the hamburgers with human meat. By doing so, I am asking the viewer to take the animals' point of view to examine, comment on, subvert, and interpret the relationships between humans and between humans and nonhumans. The augmented reality animation expands the metaphor to a broader topic by showing huge human hand feeds and plays a group of humanoid characters in a farm. The audio was extracted from BBC news: North Korea Defense Chief Hyon Yong-chol executed, to give the audience more context to the reality.
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4. Title: The Refugee
Year: 2016
Video documentation: ​https://youtu.be/BoYd05neXrg

The illustration The Refugee was inspired by a portrait photo of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghani girl who was sentenced to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws, taken by Jodi Bieber. She instantly became a symbol of the victims of war as well as a symbol against oppression. The illustration uses sheep as an icon to show how humans oppress animals for consumption or entertainment, and the augmented reality animation expands the metaphor to a broader topic by showing how people oppress themselves for their own satisfaction. The audio was extracted from BBC news: Ukraine. Why was Lenin's statue pulled down?, to give the audience more context to the reality.
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5. Title: The Bus
Year: 2016
​Video documentation: ​https://youtu.be/Mde0nXa2D8E

The illustration The Bus was inspired by Robert Frank’s photo Trolley New Orleans (1955), a depiction of social degradation resulting from the racial segregation in the mid-fifties. In The Bus, Chen uses animals to show the aspect of how humans have begun to segregate animals according to consumption or pets. Capitalism plays a big role in segregation and it altered our perception towards segregation in modern society. The audio was extracted from BBC news: Ai Weiwei in Prison, to give the audience more context to the reality.
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6. Title: Survivor of a Death Camp
Year: 2016
Video documentation: ​https://youtu.be/3GI8PtgNthk

Every year, tens of thousands of homeless dogs and cats are handed over to laboratories for use in invasive, painful, and often deadly experiments. The illustration Survivor of a Death Camp was inspired by a series of disturbing photographs showing the miserable life and death of a beautiful orange tabby cat named Double Trouble, who was tormented for months in these experiments. Such torture is not only seen from how human species treat nonhumans, as war and genocide are never absent in our civilized world. Thus, Robert Frank captured the "human version" of Double Trouble in his photo SCARRED: a man who had just got released from a Hutu death camp where the Tutsi people were being starved, beaten, abused, and some were killed. The augmented reality world on top of the illustration presents the battlefield of Iraq with a mass of destruction. The background sound of the world was the soundtrack of BBC news: What 2003's invasion did to Iraq, to connect the audience to the most recent events.
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7. Title: The Funeral
Year: 2016
Video documentation: ​https://youtu.be/7E3i9-5hHCE

The illustration The Funeral was created in memory of the infamous murder of the fourteen-year-old boy Emmett Till in 1955. While visiting relatives in Mississippi, Till whistled at a white woman and was savagely murdered by the local white residents. Pictures of his mangled body haunted the American imagination and horrified the world. Till’s murderers were charged but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury in 1955. His brutal death and the subsequent sham trial were a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.
 
Looking at the violence and injustice from a broader point of view, the human species deliberately chooses to bully, frighten, and harm the living beings who are in their power. Whether it’s a baby dolphin died after being pulled from the ocean in Argentina for selfies or a group of people chasing a goat into the ocean in Alaska and letting the animal drown. While viral video after viral video shows the human-driven cruelty that animals are up against every day, there’s never an excuse for harassing wild animals.
 
Using an animal figure, the illustration The Funeral conveys such violence and injustice similarly seen in human societies. The augmented reality world shows a group of humanoid characters that are labeled "terrorist", with a mass of arms in display. The background sound of the world was the soundtrack of BBC news: WTC 2nd attack.
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8.
Title: ​Baby on the Beach
Video documentation: ​https://youtu.be/u1fSuOut_Jo

The illustration Baby on the Beach was inspired by the sickening images that show a young dolphin's last moments before it died of dehydration when it was picked up out of the sea by selfie-takers. Sickeningly, the crowd continued to take pictures of the poor animal as it lay dead on the sandy beach. The human species deliberately chooses to bully, frighten, and harm the living beings who are in his power. Wars repeatedly occur with increased scale and broader destruction, all intended to meet the interests of the authorities who have more power than others. Also on the beach, the lifeless body of a three-year-old boy, one of at least twelve Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos, unfolded the full horror of the human tragedy. The casualties were among thousands of people fleeing war in their homeland. Using cartoonish style with bright and pure colors, Chen built a warm baby room with an empty rocking cradle in the augmented reality world, a world that the refugee babies have to risk their lives to reach, to ridicule the ugliness of the world. The background sound of the world was the soundtrack of BBC news: Migrant crisis - Child drownings highlight risks.
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