Travel the world with these 3D printed stunning textscapes

Harbin-born, Hawaii-based designer and artist Hongtao Zhou amazing typographic skylines are a feast for the eye. A gift for the wanderlasters out there with an eye for the letterform these sculptures were created using a 3D printer to recreate New York City and Shanghai’s cityscapes as a text document. Each “document” is standard letter-size. The Chinese artist creates 3D documents to reemphasis printing in modern technological world. A frank tribute to his origins as printing technology was first created in ancient China to reproduce text using woodblocks. Textscape generates letter-sized 3D documents to visually profile the subject matters of the texts, such as cities, landscapes or figures. These documents make reading process interactive for general audience or blind people to read as knowledge as well as art. This series of work has text variations of braille, language characters, calligraphies and number systems to bridge the text and its visuality in architecture, landscape, portraits and abstract matters. Zhou's work has previously been shown at National Museum of China, Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Tsinghua University Visual Art Center and the Taiwan Design Center, among dozens of other institutions across America. More of his work can be seen here.