Situation: Mandarin Oriental is a luxury hotel chain, known for exceptional service, traditional craft & innovation. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first Mandarin property in Hong Kong, it wanted a luxurious artistic spectacle to showcase its heritage and values and celebrate its fans.

Brief: Create a centrepiece performance at the 60th Anniversary Gala of The Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong which creates media coverage, reflects MOHK's core values, celebrates the community of ‘fans’ and bridges the gap between timeless luxury and innovation.

Objectives: Create a performance installation that the ‘fans’ of the Mandarin Oriental are proud to be a part of (and wish to share).

Surprise and delight guests by giving them a totally unique and unforgettable experience when they see themselves appearing on a vast canvas.

Create a beautiful commemorative final artwork, which captures a moment in time.

Budget: £ 150.000

Scale: 4.8m x 3.2m canvas

Mandarin Oriental’s mission is to ‘delight and inspire fans at every opportunity’. Their values are timeless luxury, excellence in craft and meticulous attention to detail. They were holding a 60th anniversary celebration gala for 1000 fans; celebrities, hotel guests, Hong Kong's social crowd & media.

The installation was conceived as a durational centrepiece performance that would demonstrate the brand values, whilst celebrating & wowing attendees with a world first.

The design centred around the brand: The traditional Chinese craftsmanship of painting ink onto paper, using cutting edge technology via AI and robotics, plus the personalised touch of celebrating the hotel’s community. The portrait painting was mesmerising to watch and the gradual reveal was punctuated by moments of joy when onlookers recognised their own faces emerging.

This vast and impactful artwork served as an utterly unique interactive piece of entertainment, whilst capturing the brand’s community at this historic moment in time.

Arriving guests were professionally photographed. An image handling pipeline then automatically processed the headshots: A custom trained AI model (Stable Diffusion - Image2Image) translated photographs into digital line drawings using an ‘intelligent’ understanding of sketching (not line tracing or filtering) to recreate the unique character of the subject in as few lines as possible; positioned them amidst the other portraits; and created G-Code instructions for the robotic arm.

The robot then leapt to life, guiding the ink brush over the page and rendering each line of the portrait in sequence, using just the right amount of pressure and just the right amount of ink, which was different for every single stroke. Ink was dosed via a precision peristaltic pump normally used in medicine.

The process, mesmerising to watch, served as a focal point for the duration of the evening; transitioning a blank canvas to a record of the community.

The installation was featured in many press write ups, with an estimated 90M reach and celebrated across both brand and fans’ social channels, on top of Vogue HK coverage.

The installation surpassed the highest expectations of the Mandarin Oriental clients, who felt that it was a perfect celebration of Chinese heritage through innovation. The AI portraits have been used to depict their brand fans in advertising, adorning trams around Hong Kong, created by LONDON Advertising.

The completed artwork itself was the centrepiece of the Mandarin Lobby for several months following the event.

A real honour for our creative team: Sir Peter Blake has called it “magic”.