Depth in a Folded Screen: L-Shaped LEDs and the Rise of Anamorphic Signage

High on a building standing at the corner of an intersection, there is a large LED. Most of the time it runs music videos, car commercials and cosmetics spots in rotation. Then, for one moment only, an enormous tank of water appears inside the screen. A mass of blue water slams into the wall and breaks, spray flies up, the surface settles — and the next advertisement returns. From this one minute in Seoul's Gangnam district, in 2020, the depth of the folded screen began to spread to intersections around the world.

Out of a screen that ought to be flat, something with unmistakable volume climbs free — a mass of water, a cat, a panda, a spaceship. What sustains the illusion is not the skill of the imagery alone. It is the shape of the apparatus itself: the fact that the screen folds at a corner. This essay is an attempt to gather the anamorphic signage built on L-shaped and curved folds and read it as a single lineage. This journal has already treated the individual cases in detail — WAVE in Seoul, the cat at Shinjuku's east exit, the panda on Chunxi Road in Chengdu. Here we draw out, across all of them, the mechanism, the operation and the limits they share.

Why There Has to Be a Corner

The heart of anamorphic signage lies, before the imagery itself, in the geometry of the screen.

Try to draw a three-dimensional illusion on a single flat LED and the subject can function, fundamentally, only as an image pressed flat against the screen. However you paint it leaping forward, the outline of the plane betrays the depth. Once the screen folds at a right angle, though, the situation changes. With the viewer's vantage point fixed in front of the building, the two faces are perceived as one continuous interior wall, and inside it one can fabricate the depth of the picture itself. The wave is not perceived as leaping out in front of the surface but as a tank standing behind it. The ridge line of the fold turns a set of flat planes into a vessel for solids.

The principle is not new. Anamorphosis — the technique of distortion that resolves into a correct image only when seen from one particular point — has been used again and again in painting since the Renaissance. Just as the warped skull lying across the floor of Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533) stands up only when viewed obliquely, the anamorphic LED also demands one single correct viewpoint. What the urban screen did was to transfer that old technique onto a new set of physical conditions: the corner of a building and a high-definition LED.

The angle of the fold and the density of the pixels together determine, directly, how convincing the image is. Cross Shinjuku Vision, at the east exit of Shinjuku, curves roughly 5.52 metres at the left-hand end of its 154.71-square-metre oval LED through about 90 degrees, and builds it at a 6 mm pitch — a fine grain by outdoor standards. So that a crowd waiting at the lights still reads the screen as a single continuous plane when looking up at an angle, the shape of the apparatus has been designed around the conditions of viewing. At Taikoo Li on Chunxi Road in Chengdu, a main screen of some 888 square metres folds about 90 degrees along the corner of the building, and at 8K resolution a live-action panda climbs over the edge. The corner and the pixel — unless both are in place, no image climbs free.

Lineage — From One Minute in Gangnam, 2020

The point from which this vocabulary spread across the world all at once is clear enough. In April 2020, the Seoul digital studio d'strict released WAVE under the artist name a'strict.

The LED covering the upper storeys of SMTown COEX Artium measures 80.1 metres wide by 20.1 metres tall, curving so as to take the corner of the building in its arms. Onto this surface d'strict painted a mass of water thrashing inside a closed transparent tank. At a moment when COVID-19 lockdowns had cleared people from the streets, the footage of a water mass rising on a street corner spread explosively across social media and became the byword for the anamorphic illusion on outdoor LEDs. What matters is that d'strict designed it not as a one-off site-specific work but as IP content that could be licensed to other media. In its own work metadata, the company states the aim like this.

We aim to develop numerous attractive visual content that can be licensed into any size and shape of the screen consistently.

— d'strict — ART CONTENTSsource

Content that can be licensed consistently into any size and shape of screen — that single sentence became the blueprint for everything that followed. d'strict itself, in July 2021, deployed Waterfall-NYC across the tower-side faces of One Times Square in collaboration with Samsung Electronics, treating a vertical run of LEDs as the wall of a single waterfall and inserting a fictional plunge pool into a New York intersection.

And in the same year, folded screens began to move in Tokyo and Chengdu as well. In July 2021 the 3D giant cat entered full broadcast on Cross Shinjuku Vision at Shinjuku's east exit, and from the autumn of that year the naked-eye 3D panda became a fixture on the L-shaped LED at Taikoo Li in Chengdu. Each is an implementation that follows the structure WAVE established: an L-shaped surface, fixed-viewpoint anamorphosis, and a programming slot inside the advertising slot. It was not the work that was exported but the method that propagated — and there lies the heart of this lineage's reproducibility.

The Fold Travels the World

The depth of the folded screen that WAVE demonstrated had already crossed to China within 2020. The LED wrapping Yingjia Plaza at Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li in Chengdu — an L-shaped curved surface of the 900-square-metre class, built by LianTronics of Shenzhen — launched its first spaceship off the wall in October 2020, six months after WAVE was released. The footage, in which an enormous "Star Trek"-style spacecraft bursts out through the corner of the building, spread across Chinese social media and became the Chinese starting point for the outdoor 3D LED. To bring out the 3D effect, the manufacturer is said to have rebuilt the screen with a tighter curve at the corner.

What must not be overlooked is that the spaceship and the panda are events on the same screen. A single LED, folded at a corner on Chunxi Road in Chengdu, raises a spaceship at one moment and a panda at another. The apparatus — the vessel — stays one and the same, and only the image kindled within it is exchanged. Once the fold has been established as a standard form of vessel, the city begins to pour different images into that vessel according to the season and the occasion.

From there, the folded screen spread beyond East Asia. At Wanda Plaza in Wanzhou, Chongqing, in 2022, an obtuse-angled curved LED surface — again by LianTronics — carried footage of an astronaut swimming out toward a space station. In Kuala Lumpur, for Lunar New Year 2024, Pavilion KL used two large LEDs facing one another across the street at Bukit Bintang to unfold a ten-minute story above the roadway, in which a rabbit turns into a golden dragon. d'strict itself exported WAVE as a licensed product, mounting a variant version — a wave breaking in the desert — on a newly built L-shaped LED at the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation across 2023 and 2024.

In Europe, the fold has begun to appear as more permanent infrastructure. In July 2025, at Center am Potsdamer Platz in Berlin — the former Sony Center — a 3D-capable DOOH surface described as among the largest in Germany was unveiled. Some 257 square metres of LED, carrying more than 5.7 million pixels, wraps 90 degrees around the corner of the building: the same authentic geometry of the corner found at WAVE and at Taikoo Li in Chengdu. In five years, a one-minute experiment in Seoul had reached the status of permanent equipment in a European redevelopment block.

That said, the pseudo-solid image does not make the fold an absolute condition. At Piccadilly Circus in London, since 2021, "forced perspective" advertisements in which wristwatches and drinks burst through the screen have run on a single, almost flat curved LED operated by Ocean Outdoor. Fix the viewpoint at one point — in front of the Eros statue — and even on a flat plane the image appears to leap out. But where the flat illusion stops at a pop-up leaping in front of the surface, a screen with a fold makes the viewer perceive a space behind the surface, and can fabricate the vessel itself in which the image is held. What separates the wristwatch at Piccadilly from the water mass in Seoul is neither resolution nor budget but this difference of geometry. Only a screen with a fold brings a whole container of depth, entire, onto a street corner.

A Programming Slot Inside the Advertising Slot

The other thing this lineage holds in common lies not in how the imagery looks but in how time is operated.

The screens on which these illusions appear are, almost without exception, commercial DOOH (digital out-of-home). The surface at SMTown COEX is premium advertising inventory in the SM Entertainment orbit; Cross Shinjuku Vision and Taikoo Li in Chengdu both have the carrying of advertising as their main business. And yet the operators of all of them deliberately reserve, inside the advertising rotation, a stretch of time that is not advertising. WAVE takes a bare minute each hour; the Shinjuku cat runs at the top of each hour and in step with the morning and evening switch-on and switch-off; the Chengdu panda appears for a few seconds every few minutes within a limited window at night. A portion of time that could have been filled with advertising is surrendered not to a buyer of slots but to an edited work by the operator or the studio.

Sean Lee (Lee Sung-ho) of d'strict has stated plainly that the motive behind WAVE was not the replacement of the advertising slot.

The large-format outdoor display is mostly used for advertisements and other commercial projects. However, we thought of the public characteristics of the giant LED display as people would see it while walking down the street. So we came up with the public media art of the waves for everyone.

— The Korea Timessource

Commercial use is preserved as the premise. On top of that premise, the public character of the screen as it appears to people walking down the street — who are pedestrians before they are anyone's customers — is secured as a separate editorial subject. The same judgement is at work in Chengdu. The co-founder of FlintWalk, the studio behind the naked-eye 3D at Taikoo Li, has said that what divides success from failure in the operation of a screen is the creativity of the content one generates oneself. An advertising surface, and yet the quality of the editorial decision about what to put on it sits at the centre of the business. It is this stance that turns a mere billboard into a stage on which creatures and natural phenomena rise up night after night.

The lineage of anamorphic signage is, in other words, an invention in operation as much as an invention in vision. To punch a single break, governed by a different programming principle, into the continuous time the ad-server rules — it was the reproducibility of that operation that propagated from city to city.

A Conjuring Trick from a Single Point — The Limits of the Method

Elevating a lineage is not, by itself, criticism. The folded-screen illusion has a number of structural weaknesses.

First, the viewpoint is fixed at a single point. An anamorphic image reads as solid only from the correct angle. Step off that one point at the intersection and the water mass and the panda alike collapse into distorted flat footage. The work binds its viewer to a particular place to stand. Second, the camera is the primary audience. Much anamorphic footage is tuned to resolve more cleanly through a smartphone lens than through the naked eye. After full broadcast began, Cross Shinjuku Vision ran into the problem that the screen did not photograph well, and an adjustment to the refresh rate was added. For an apparatus with circulation on social media written into its premise, appearing to the human eye and appearing to the camera are separate requirements, and the latter is frequently given priority. The image on the street corner is designed less for the person looking up on the spot than for the person who will play the video back later.

Third, and least ignorable of all, is the rapid slide of the method into cliché. Water, waterfalls, giant creatures, spaceships — the catalogue of motifs that climb over the edge and leap out is by now almost identical in every city in the world. If the shock of WAVE came from the unexpectedness of a work appearing in the middle of the city, that unexpectedness wears away quickly under repetition. In a city where something leaps out at every intersection, leaping out is no longer a surprise in itself. The strength of a work designed as licensable IP is also, precisely, the speed with which it is consumed to exhaustion as a standard form.

The anamorphic image is at once a technique for kindling one point of depth in the city and a technique that flattens that depth into a sideshow. Having accepted this ambivalence, one still has to ask what remains.

The Fold as Ma, the Image as Tenkei

Let us restate what remains in this journal's own vocabulary.

The corner at which the screen folds is the place where two surfaces meet and space is born — what Japanese spatial aesthetics calls ma (間), the interval. A single flat LED has no such interval, and that is exactly why the image clings to the plane. The ridge line of the fold is an operation that opens space inside the screen, and it is in that opened place that the water mass, the panda and the cat acquire volume and stand up. Without ma, no tenkei rises either.

And on the side of operation, the single minute punched into the continuity of advertising works as a ma along the axis of time. A slight break is opened in the flat, featureless time the ad-server rules, and an edited image is kindled in it. The fold in space and the break in time — when these two intervals overlap, an array of 6 mm-pitch LEDs becomes a single cat living at the east exit of Shinjuku, and a one-minute wave rising on a corner in Gangnam.

When one sets out to reread the city as a museum, the hardest places are those where vision is already saturated — an intersection given over entirely to advertising. What the lineage of anamorphic signage demonstrates is that even in the midst of that saturation, a small decision not to use the whole of the screen — the decision to open an interval in space and in time — can let a single image take up residence in the landscape. Neither the speed of the slide into cliché nor the confinement of the fixed viewpoint erases that one point. The depth of the folded screen goes on, every hour, at some corner of the city, kindling something in the air above the street.

Sources

1. fig.001PUBLIC MEDIA ART 'WAVE' by a'strict
2. fig.002PUBLIC MEDIA ART 'Waterfall-NYC' by a'strict
3. fig.003Cross Shinjuku Vision — Official Site
4. fig.004FlintWalk(燧石行)— 成都太古里裸眼3D
5. fig.005LianTronics — Glasses-free 3D “Star Trek” LED Screen in Chengdu / 遠洋太古里 盈嘉大厦
6. [6]d’strict — Official Site
7. [7]PUBLIC MEDIA ART 'WHALE #2' (Times Square) by a'strict — Vimeo (official)
8. [8]blooloop,d’strict brings its WAVE artwork to Abu Dhabi
9. [9]3D Astronaut Flies out of LianTronics LED Wall in Chongqing Wanzhou Wanda Plaza
10. [10]MARKETING-INTERACTIVE,Pavilion KL rings in Year of the Dragon with 3D anamorphic display
11. [11]AV Interactive,Germany’s largest 3D LED DOOH display unveiled in Berlin
12. [12]AV Interactive,Forced perspective 3D LED advertising comes to London (Piccadilly Lights)
13. [13]invidis / sixteen:nine,Anamorphic Illusions On LED Displays: The Evolution Of An Art Form
14. [14]Hans Holbein the Younger — The Ambassadors (1533), The National Gallery, London
15. [15]The Korea Times,Design company d’strict makes splash in art gallery
16. [16]Wallpaper*,a’strict: the South Korean digital art collective bringing nature to urban life
17. [17]HIBINOによるオーバル型LEDディスプレイ「クロス新宿ビジョン」 — ヒビノクロマテック
18. [18]World's first panda-themed naked-eye 3D video debuts in Chengdu — ECNS

Operations Record

OPERATOR

The media operators of each site (SMTown COEX Artium, Cross Space, Taikoo Li and others); the anamorphic content is produced and programmed by studios such as d'strict (a'strict) and FlintWalk

LOCATION

Seoul, Tokyo, Chengdu

MODEL

Ad-slot takeover — The shared structure is to punch a non-advertising slot into the commercial DOOH rotation; established by d'strict's WAVE and adopted by intersections in other cities

CADENCE

Typically appears for seconds to minutes each hour; resolves into 3D only from a single fixed viewpoint

SPEC

Large LED surfaces that fold at a corner; two faces meet at roughly a right angle, and fixed-viewpoint anamorphosis fabricates depth across the seam

SINCE

2020

STATUS

Active

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