Painted City Blocks

"QUANTUM SHOT" #187
Link - by Avi Abrams

Huangjiaoping street in Chongqing, China

About a month ago we published an article about Cool Murals and Painted Buildings - but looks like we underestimated the audacity of some urban designers. In the high-density area of Chongqing, China (home to some 4.1 million people) they took an entire 1.2 km street - and turned it into a masterpiece of the exceptional graffiti art.

(images credit: Thalia Kwok, via)

The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts has come up with a titanic group effort, involving more than 300 artists (mostly students) and covering more than a kilometer of apartment blocks with the colorful cartoons and graffiti - more info. You can see, however, that some buildings remain in dire need of renovation:

(images credit: David Barrie, Newsyc)

Artists are using powerful projectors to display designs on the walls during the painting process:

The Huangjiaoping street is expected to be completed this summer. I'm wondering if it may not become an on-going project, spreading madness of color from block to block, until the whole city is covered in radical and unavoidable designs, with citizens desperately trying to find a gray spot...

Chongqing's urban landscape has been quite an intense experience in itself, even before the start of this project (see photos below). But now the gaudy Huangjiaoping street will become a wonder to behold - if and when the collective art project will be completely finished.

(images credit: Zhao Xiang)

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Painted City Blocks in Russia

Wikipedia hosts an interesting panoramic view of the apartment complex in Ramenskoye, a small city south-east of Moscow, which we covered in our Cool Murals and Painted Buildings article (see also original photos by Sturman)

(images via)

Work-in-progress:

City of Norilsk (Siberia, Russia) also has some painted urban blocks (though they are significantly cheesier in appearance):

(image via)

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Sony's Bravia "Paint Explosions" Commercial

All these projects are nothing, however, compared with the certain staged video, issued by the Sony Corp. as a highly-creative commercial for Bravia TV. This video is nothing short of astonishing, and could easily be one of the better moments in the history of advertising. The whole site is worth checking out, marveling at the mechanics of "how they did it":

Featuring a bombastic orchestral soundtrack, it unleashes the complete transformation of a city block - sprayed over with one thousand liters of exploded paint.

70,000 liters of paint
358 single bottle bombs
33 sextuple air cluster bombs
22 Triple hung cluster bombs
268 mortars
33 Triple Mortars
22 Double mortars
358 meters of weld
330 meters of steel pipe
57 km of copper wire