Surface & Signal Press has announced the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of EVA London 2026 that examines the intersection of digital printing, urban repair, and trompe l'oeil. The paper, "Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood and New Nature: Simulation with Paper and Digital Printing," by Jiaqi Li, Wenru Xu, and Elke Reinhuber, analyzes two artworks by Li that use photography and digital processing to create physical paper surfaces that intervene in public spaces.
The paper is available open access at https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/EVA2026.15. It focuses on two works: New Nature (2019) and Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood (2020). In New Nature, photographs of organic materials such as banana peel, chicken skin, plants, and caterpillars were transformed into repeating digital textures and printed on paper. The resulting prints were assembled into more than fifty hollow sculptural forms, juxtaposing the visual appearance of organic matter with lightweight, constructed interiors. This contrast draws attention to the separation between surface and structure.
Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood began with photographs of damaged surfaces in Chicago—including cracks in roads, walls, paving, and transit stations. The damaged areas were digitally reconstructed and printed at approximately their original scale. The paper images were then placed over the damaged sites as temporary interventions. The paper explains that these interventions did not repair the underlying material but made visible the difference between an appearance of repair and material repair.
The authors position these projects between simulation, trompe l'oeil, and optical illusion. Rather than seeking flawless deception, the works retain visible seams, repeated textures, paper edges, and other material inconsistencies. These features allow viewers to recognize the construction of the image while it occupies physical space. The paper proposes the term "expanded trompe l'oeil" for contemporary practices that extend beyond illusionistic painting to include photography, digital printing, sculpture, installation, screens, projections, public interventions, and video-game aesthetics. It argues that the imperfect return of a digital image to material form can reveal a productive gap between virtual representation and physical objects.
The paper appears on pages 83-88 of the open-access Proceedings of EVA London 2026, published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. EVA London, or Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, is an interdisciplinary conference on art, visualization, and digital technologies. The 2026 conference took place in London and online from July 13 to 17.
Surface & Signal Press is an independent arts-research communications imprint operated by Jeekwai Art Co Ltd. The imprint publishes factual, accessible communications about contemporary art, visual culture, digital media, and research-led creative practice. Its work focuses on how images, materials, and technical systems shape public and everyday environments.
