A Body for the City's Panda: Chengdu's Naked-Eye 3D and Lawrence Argent's I Am Here

Chunxi Road (春熙路) at night, in the central commercial district of Chengdu. Stand at the corner where Zhongshamao Street bends into Dongjinjiang Street, and on the surface of the large LED at Taikoo Li (太古里) a panda hooks its forepaws over the edge of the screen. Its torso pushes forward, it tilts its face toward you, and for a few seconds it leans out over the street. Out of a screen that ought to be flat, a creature with unmistakable volume climbs free.

A few hundred metres from there, on the corner of the Chengdu International Finance Square (Chengdu IFS) building, a second panda has been climbing since 2014. It is a colossal sculpture roughly 15 metres tall and weighing 13 tonnes. It hooks its paws over the edge of the roof, looks down at the city, and grins.

Two pandas, in the same city and on the same block. One is an immobile mass of steel; the other, an image that light raises for a single instant. Chengdu has given the animal that serves as its emblem two vessels of entirely different natures. This essay is an attempt to read those two vessels alongside each other.

A Vessel of Steel — The Climbing Panda

Chengdu IFS opened on 14 January 2014. Installed on the building's northeast corner to mark that opening was I Am Here, by the British-born sculptor Lawrence Argent.

Built from geometric facets, the panda climbs some 120 feet (more than 36 metres) of wall, pokes only its head over the roofline, and gazes down at the city. The title, I Am Here, comes straight from that impudent expression. The composition is one in which one of the rarest animals on earth clings innocently to a new high-rise and announces: I'm here.

The work came out of a charity art project for panda conservation, commissioned from Argent by the Hong Kong creative studio AllRightsReserved. Makers from around the world — among them Pharrell Williams and Yohji Yamamoto — designed small panda figures, which were then auctioned, with all proceeds donated to the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda. The installation was initially temporary, but its popularity turned it into a permanent one.

Argent (1957–2017) is also known for I See What You Mean (2005), the roughly 12-metre blue bear peering into the Denver convention centre. The same motif — an enormous animal turning its curiosity on a building, peering at its interior, or at the city — was in Chengdu swapped for the species native to that city. The sculpture is an apparatus that fixes a city's emblem to a street corner as an immobile body of steel.

A Vessel of Light — The Panda That Climbs Out

A few years after the sculpture, on another corner of the same block, a second panda began to move.

The large LED mounted on the wall of Yingjia Plaza (盈嘉大厦) at Taikoo Li, Chunxi Road, pairs a main screen of about 888 square metres with an adjacent screen of about 450 square metres, at 8K resolution. The surface folds roughly 90 degrees around the corner of the building, and this curved configuration is the very heart of the trick. Using the anamorphic method — forced perspective built for a restricted viewpoint — a run of flat surfaces resolves into a solid with depth only when seen from one particular angle. The LED panels were supplied by Liantronics of Shenzhen.

The naked-eye 3D footage running across the screen is made by Flint Walk (燧石行), a video production studio based in Chengdu. Its best-known work, Panda Tribute (致敬熊猫), is held to be the world's first naked-eye 3D live-action film of a giant panda. The production team worked with the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, shooting real pandas over four days at the Shenshuping base in Wolong. In the footage, released in 2021, the panda hauls itself over the edge of the screen and thrusts a forepaw out into the street. Other 3D pieces, in which a spacecraft or a giant mechanical hand breaks through the frame, are built by the same method.

What matters here is the fact that this large screen is, by default, a slot of commercial DOOH (digital out-of-home advertising). The 3D panda is inserted between the ordinary advertising cycles, a few seconds at a time every few minutes. Only those who happen to pass by during the limited evening hours are present for the moment. A co-founder of Flint Walk has said that what separates success from failure in operating a screen is "the creativity of the content you generate yourself." An advertising surface, and yet one that places the editorial quality of what is shown on that surface at the centre of the business — it is this position that turns the Chengdu corner from a mere billboard into a stage on which a panda rises every night.

The Corner as Ma, the Panda as Tenkei

The two vessels are made of entirely different technologies. One is an immobile sculpture of welded steel plate; the other, an image that light and anamorphic computation raise for an instant. And yet the two share a strikingly similar structure.

Both require the corner of a building. Argent's panda cannot take up the posture of climbing without the ridge line of the building's edge. Flint Walk's panda cannot read as a solid climbing out of the plane without the corner where the screen folds at 90 degrees. A corner is the place where two surfaces meet and space is born — what Japanese spatial aesthetics calls ma (間), the interval. Only by using this street-corner interval as a foothold do the pandas of Chengdu acquire volume in the first place.

And each of these pandas works as a tenkei — a point of scenery kindled small within the landscape of the city. For all their overwhelming scale, they do not fill the city up; they appear at one particular corner, at one particular moment. Like the small figures and boats painted into a landscape scroll, they suddenly kindle meaning in a scene of towers and crowds. Both, moreover, tie their origins back to a site of conservation: the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda. For Chengdu the panda is not merely a decorative mascot but a knot of ecology and emblem, the point at which the city raises its own endangered native species at urban scale.

The anamorphic naked-eye 3D method itself is by now becoming a common language among the world's urban screens. d'strict's WAVE (2020), which sealed an enormous wave inside a tank at COEX K-Pop Square in Seoul, was the point from which that vocabulary spread all at once (treated in detail in "A Wave in a Glass Box"). If WAVE took the expression of the screen as a plane for its own subject, what the pandas of Chengdu show is a question of the vessel: what kind of body a city's emblem should be lodged in.

In fact, this vessel keeps multiplying within Chengdu. In 2024, in the commercial district of Jiaozi Park (交子公園), a naked-eye 3D panda some 20 metres tall rose on another large screen. Where the steel sculpture fixed a single animal to one street corner, the vessel of light is copied here and there across the city, and goes on increasing.

The Same Totem, Two Bodies

Walk through Chengdu and you notice that the city repeats its own emblem everywhere. On signs, in sculpture, on screens, there is a panda. Among them, the two on Chunxi Road present the two most contrasting solutions to the act of lodging an emblem in a vessel.

One clings semi-permanently to its corner and goes on looking down at the city. The other leans out over the street for a few minutes of the night, then disappears back into the flow of advertising. Fixity and vanishing, steel and light, sculpture and anamorphosis. But for anyone who stops and looks up, the difference is probably not large. In either moment, in the interval that is the street corner, a panda is announcing that it is here.

Sources

1. fig.001FlintWalk(燧石行)— 跟随熊猫兄妹游成都・成都太古里裸眼3D
2. [2]Lawrence Argent — I Am Here (Artist's Official Site)
3. [3]AllRightsReserved — I AM HERE
4. [4]“I AM HERE” Panda — Chengdu IFS Official Site
5. [5]'I am here' giant panda debuts in Chengdu — China.org.cn
6. [6]Giant panda scales Chengdu mall — China Daily
7. [7]World's first panda-themed naked-eye 3D video debuts in Chengdu — ECNS
8. [8]成都太古里的3D熊猫，真没你看到的那么简单 — 澎湃新闻
9. [9]Virtual Pandas Loom Over Busy Chengdu Street Corner — invidis

Operations Record

OPERATOR

A commercial DOOH surface on Yingjia Plaza at Taikoo Li, Chunxi Road; the naked-eye 3D content is made and programmed by studio Flint Walk

LOCATION

Chengdu

MODEL

Ad-slot takeover — Between standard ad cycles the studio inserts its own naked-eye 3D works; Panda Tribute was shot with the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda

CADENCE

A few seconds at a time, every few minutes, within limited evening hours

SPEC

A c. 888 m² main screen with a c. 450 m² neighbour, in 8K; the surface bends c. 90 degrees around the corner for anamorphic illusions; LED panels by Liantronics, Shenzhen

SINCE

2021

STATUS

Active

View on the registry