  Perceiving paintings entails more than merely engaging the audience's eyes
and brains; their perceptions and experiences of a painting can be intricately
connected with body movement. This paper proposes an interactive art approach
entitled "Painterly Reality" that facilitates the perception and interaction
with paintings in a three-dimensional manner. Its objective is to promote
bodily engagement with the painting (i.e., embedded body embodiment and its
movement and interaction) to enhance the audience's experience, while
maintaining its essence. Unlike two-dimensional interactions, this approach
constructs the Painterly Reality by capturing the audience's body embodiment in
real-time and embedding into a three-dimensional painterly world derived from a
given painting input. Through their body embodiment, the audience can navigate
the painterly world and play with the magical realism (i.e., interactive
painterly objects), fostering meaningful experiences via interactions. The
Painterly Reality is subsequently projected through an Augmented Reality Mirror
as a live painting and displayed in front of the audience. Hence, the audience
can gain enhanced experiences through bodily engagement while simultaneously
viewing and appreciating the live painting. The paper implements the proposed
approach as an interactive artwork, entitled "Everyday Conjunctive," with Fong
Tse Ka's painting and installs in a local museum, which successfully enhances
audience experience through bodily engagement.
