Outside the Vapiano restaurant at Monroe and Wabash in Chicago, this is not a door but a printed picture of a door that replaces the functional door. A fake door. The bottom color is fading due to sunlight and rainfall.

In the city, whenever maintenance or renovation work begins, our daily movement is interrupted. A peculiar phenomenon occurs.

I have been collecting these street photographs since 2017 across Chicago, San Francisco, Beijing, Hong Kong, Glasgow, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and many other cities (Li 2026).

This photo archive became more than documentation; it evolved into a method of embodied inquiry. Each photograph required me to slow down, to position my body in relation to these surfaces, to notice how other pedestrians navigated around them. Some walked past without acknowledgment, their bodies flowing around the obstruction as if it were invisible. Others paused, tilted their heads, or even reached out to touch the printed surface, confirming through haptic feedback what their eyes already suspected: this is not what it appears to be.

This is not just a visual backdrop; it is a spatial intervention. If we look closely at this behavior or this decoration of engineering, we find a shared technique, a specific attitude towards life. It is a lineage that traces back to a specific branch of ancient Western painting: Trompe l’oeil.

Consider the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome. In 1685, the Jesuit Andrea Pozzo painted a spectacular fresco on the nave ceiling. Standing in the center, looking up, the viewer’s body loses its architectural anchor. The fresco dissolves the physical roof, creating the illusion of a space expanding infinitely towards the heavens (Li 2025).

Or consider Pere Borrell del Caso’s 1874 painting, Escaping Criticism. The artist depicts a boy climbing out of the frame. His hands and feet seem to break the boundary between the representational space and our corporeal reality.

Whether it is these masterpieces or the printed vinyls on our streets today, they share two characteristics: First, a one-to-one replication of reality. And second, a dependency on the surrounding environment to sell the illusion.

But there is a shift. The context has moved from art history to sociology. The location has moved from the cathedral to the street corner. And the encounter has shifted from a static gaze to a mobile body moving through the urban landscape. This is what I call “Expanded Trompe l’oeil.”

To understand this, we must distinguish between three concepts: Simulation, Illusion, and Trompe l’oeil.

Simulation is distinct from reality. Think of the hotels in Las Vegas, or a video game. We know physically that we are not in Paris or Venice, even if the facade suggests it. We can clearly separate the physical world from the simulated one.

Illusion, however, effectively deceives not just the eye, but the brain. Like the Müller-Lyer (1889) test, or like a dream. In a dream, tactile sensation and scent are indistinguishable from reality. The deception is total.

Trompe l’oeil occupies the middle ground. As art historian Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (2002) argues, “the goal of trompe l’oeil is not the continuous deception of the viewer, …but rather the feeling of astonishment at one’s own perceptions.” The goal is to create a brief moment of surprise. As René Magritte revealed in La Condition Humaine, true trompe l’oeil leaves a clue. It invites the viewer to spot the trick. It creates a momentary “stumble” in our perception. Once the veil is lifted, we are left to contemplate the relationship between the truth and the image.

Why do we retreat into these images? In media ecology, scholars argue that the screen, and by extension, the printed image, creates a “safe zone.”

Take the case of this printed grass in a children’s playground. Those stock photos of grass pasted over the floor do more than decorate.

It offers what scholars like Jennifer Barker (2009) and Laura U. Marks (2002) describe as “haptic visuality,” an image that invites our eyes to graze the surface like skin. As Giuliana Bruno (2014) reminds us, this surface is not superficial; it is a site of deep materiality. But this touch is sanitized. As Francesco Casetti (2023) observes, this seamless digital perfection acts as a protective membrane. It neutralizes the raw danger of nature, leaving behind a consumable, risk-free surface.

However, we as embodied subjects are not naive. We know the grass is fake. So, why do we choose to participate?

To answer this, we look to the concept of “Kayfabe”. As Reinhard (2019) suggests, modern illusion is a social contract. Consider the artist Liping He and his performance, As Long as There Is Sand in the Heart, Everywhere Is the Maldives. He lay his nearly naked body on a chaotic, concrete sidewalk, holding a cocktail, acting as if he were on a pristine beach.

By placing his vulnerable body against the harsh urban ground, he radicalized the logic of trompe l’oeil. The public joined in. As MacDowall and Budge (2021) might argue, the street became a photogenic stage for performance. Liping He revealed that the essence of illusion is not visual perfection, but a shared will to believe. The performance echoes Walton’s (1991) claim: “…appreciators use paintings and novels as props in games of make-believe, much as children use dolls and toy trucks, and that appreciators participate in these games.”

When we look at construction hoardings wrapped in forest prints, we are witnessing a theoretical engagement with biological mimicry. But this is not just about fooling a predator.

Drawing on Roger Caillois (1984), this is a form of “psychasthenia”. It is a distinct impulse for the organism to dissolve into the environment. It is a desire to shed the boundaries of the self and merge with the space.

We see this weaponized by artist Kelly Kristin Jones. She uses printed images of the background to cover up “problematic” monuments. By forcing these heavy statues to dissolve back into the background, she performs a political erasure.

Jones’s interventions make explicit that these surfaces are never neutral. They are tools of governance, of memory management, of spatial control. When a monument is covered, it is not removed; it is rendered invisible while remaining present. This is a form of political trompe l’oeil, the appearance of resolution without the substance of change.

And look at the texture. The images are often pixelated or physically buckling, like the paper skins in Stephanie Syjuco’s work. As Hito Steyerl (2009) argues in her defense of the “Poor Image,” these glitches are the fingerprints of our digital reality interacting with the physical world.

This logic of the “glitch” and the “surface” serves as the foundation for my practice-based research. I began by turning this inquiry onto my own body in the performance Camouflage.

A violent attack in Beijing happened in 2018. In response to the incident and drawing on Caillois’s psychasthenia theory, I believe the environment is not safe until there is a camouflage suit for merging into the shopping mall.

Applying the logic of digital texture mapping to the physical self, I photographed the surfaces of the built environment, tiled walls, concrete floors, and printed them onto fabric suits. I then wrapped my living, breathing body in these static digital skins.

In the performance, I attempt to merge with the background. But unlike perfect animal mimicry, this act is deliberately imperfect. I become a “glitch” in the real world. My three-dimensional movement disrupts the two-dimensional alignment. By forcing the biological body to flatten itself into a surface, the work exposes the absurdity of our rendered reality. I am no longer a person; I am a texture map that has failed to load correctly.

This methodology then expanded from my own skin to the skin of the city in Fixing Chicago Neighbourhood.

Treating the city itself as a wounded body, I capture the textures of the intact urban environment, the pristine brick walls, the unbroken asphalt, and print them out as digital patches. I then crouch down on the pavement, using my own hands to paste these prints directly over the city’s wounds: the potholes, the cracks, and the peeling paint.

In doing so, this work enacts the idiom “to paper over”. It is a band-aid of pixels on a body of concrete. We accept these “risk-free surfaces” as props in what Kendall Walton (1990) would call our collective game of make-believe.

Unlike traditional restoration, these paper patches do not heal the structure. They create a friction in the pedestrian’s path. By wrapping the hard physical world in a fragile digital skin, the work exposes the dissociation between surface and substance. It forces the walking body to pause, to sense the discrepancy. Are we looking at the world itself, or are we just navigating a fragile shell of rendered surfaces?

The public response to these interventions varied significantly. Some pedestrians stepped over the patches without acknowledgment, their bodies trained to ignore minor disruptions in the urban fabric. Others stopped, crouched down, examined the edges where the paper met the pavement. A few even attempted to peel back the corners, testing the adhesion, verifying the artifice, and stumbled in the brief moment of surprise that those new trompe l’oeil created. These moments of interaction became part of the work, the intervention was not complete until it had been encountered, questioned, potentially disturbed.

The implications extend beyond the specific sites of intervention. In an era where digital mediation increasingly structures our experience of space, from augmented reality overlays to algorithmically curated navigation, questions of surface, skin, and glitch become urgently political. Who controls the rendered environment? Whose wounds are papered over, and whose are left exposed? What forms of resistance emerge when we refuse the smooth surface, when we insist on the visibility of the crack, the tear, the failure?