Shadow Art at Shadow Puppet Theatre

Inspired by a famous Chinese folktale “Legend of the White Snake” and our previous projects: Shadow Play and Shadow Art AI Experiment, “Shadow Art: Experience a Living Tradition” is a project we did for Google Arts & Culture to add a magical interactive experience to traditional shadow puppetry, using Deep Learning technology for hand gesture recognition.

We have exhibited “Shadow Art: Experience a Living Tradition” at WAIC 2019, GDD China 2019, WIC 2019, and also launched a web app version as a Google Arts & Culture Experiment. And for the latest exhibition, we brought Shadow Art to its origin: an actual shadow puppetry theatre in Wuzhen, China, to connect today’s people and state-of-the-art technology with the ancient art.