Your Ship Has Landed is a riotous explosion of colour, form and experience
The NOW Gallery on London’s Greenwich Peninsula has been transformed into an immersive, technicolour world by set designer and multidisciplinary artist Lydia Chan. Chosen for the gallery’s 2021 Design Commission, Chan has filled the space and animated the facades with swirling, multicolour cartoon-like shapes.
The installation – titled Your Ship Has Landed – explores science fiction through a hyper-joyful, albeit playfully monstrous, lens. Chan has reinterpreted nature as a foreign planet and the surreal, maximalist environment seeks to bridge the gap between contemporary digital lifestyles and our renewed experience of the natural world.
Although the installation already forms a physically immersive environment, its fantastical experience can be heightened via augmented reality (AR) technology. Chan collaborated with digital artists Songyee Kim and Thibaut Evrard to create the AR experience, in which visitors install a filter, hold up their phone to the installation and be ‘transported to another world’.
Chan trained as an interior designer before studying fashion communication and promotion, and her practice has evolved to straddle set design, art and ‘worldbuilding’, working with clients including Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, Vogue China and Gucci.
Your Ship Has Landed is the eighth installation in NOW Gallery’s ongoing Design Commission, which has previously seen installations from Camille Walala, Fred Butler and Studio Morison.
Your Ship Has Landed is on show at NOW Gallery until 6 March 2022
