China’s 3D Artist Qi Xinghua

Chinese 3D artist Qi Xinghua’s huge 3D painting, which is called ‘Lions Gate Gorge’, has set a new Guinness World Record as the world’s largest 3D painting.

His breathtaking artwork, created in a square in front of a shopping mall in Guangzhou Baiyan Wanda Plaza in Guangzhou, China, measures a staggering 23m wide and 32m long on the ground, while the wall it utilises is more than 6m high. It took him a month of painstaking work to complete.

The painting is so lifelike that passers-by said they felt dizzy while standing on the ‘ropes’ strung across a huge, gaping hole in the painting.

Inspired by western 3D chalk street paintings, Qi started focusing on multi-dimensional art in 2002 by enrolling in the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Qi Xinghua used a technique popularised by American street artist Kurt Wenner, a former Nasa illustrator who began street painting in Rome in 1982, inspired by Renaissance frescos and sculptures.

Anamorphic art – the technique used by classical artists to create the illusion of height – gives a perception of depth to the street surface and has become an increasingly popular art form around the world.

Perspective in his paintings is painstakingly calculated and he often visits the sites where his work is set to be shown beforehand to judge the space and lighting conditions.

He says the secret to his paintings lies in breaking people’s traditional perception of artwork.

Qi  said “To put it in the simplest way, it’s reversed vision, which is also called inverse-perspective. From our normal vision, nearby objects are big and far away ones are small. I use the opposite method to make far away objects big and close objects small. In this way, a two-dimensional painting turns three-dimensional.”

Qi says he has calculated three different formulas that can be applied on all paintings of varying sizes.

A spokesman for Guinness World Records said: ‘The painting, entitled Lions Gate Gorge, measured 892.15m² sets a new Guinness World Records title for the world’s largest anamorphic painting.

‘The record holder, Qi Xinghua, had also held the previous record with a painting measuring 535.3m² and with this new painting beat the previous image by 356m².’