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Artistic Innovation

Virtual Reality - A New Art Vision of Oriental and Western Painting

In the International Biennial and Triennial exhibitions held in recent years, it is obvious that the assimilation of technology, human behavior and artistic creations has become a major trend in the development of arts all over the world. By crossover the bondage of media, utilizing new information technology and reshape the traditional artistic vocabulary, not only visual arts has been brought to a new horizon, but the creativity and imaginations of human kind are enriched with unbound possibilities.

In the West, If the work 'Anthropometries de l'Epoque bleue', in which Yves Klein in 1960 asked models with bodies coated with paint to throw themselves on the canvas to create painting, activated artists to review the relationship between action and the expressive mode of painting and if the action paintings of Jackson Pollock provoked challenges to conventional aesthetic values and techniques, then would a language of the painting emerge if people could combine human actions, behaviors and new technological means to go beyond the graphic pictorial plane and construct a three-dimensional painting space?

In the East, the art of calligraphy and painting remain the mainstreams of Chinese art. The manipulation of dots and lines, the modulation of ink and color tones and the interaction and contrast of the void and solid spaces enhance art to a spiritual spectrum beyond mere resemblance of the pictorial subjects. When the arm controls the waist, dots accumulate to form linear configurations, lines generate forms and the creative mind pre-dominates the objects, the artist's pursuit of a realm in which human spirit and the nature merge would be fulfilled. Interweaved lines create spaces between the swift and fluid calligraphic strokes and on the pictorial planes of landscapes that one aspires to walk and settle inside. Thus the sense of three-dimensionality is laid even on the flat graphic plane and dynamic movement is lodged within tranquility, revealing the inner essence of Chinese art. What can we imagine if these modulations of lines, ink and colors happen and change with our movements and instant actions coming from the mind, merging with our bodies and spirits? Would this bring about new creative horizons of human kind?

When we enter the virtual 3D painting world being developed by Young Hay and Prof. Horace Ip as well as their CityU colleagues, we may acquire unique experience of these new possibilities. When the body becomes a brush and with our instant ideas and actions, it is no longer necessary to use real brush, ink or color. The movements would generate lines of different shapes, length and width. By means of computer and digital devices, tracking of our body language, action, interaction of the movements, no matter intentional or not, would be recorded and could be monitored to form different spatial facets. When we experience that the action paintings of Klein and Pollock are realized in the 3D space and when we found that the calligraphic strokes of running and cursive scripts of Wang Xizhi and the ink and brush styles of Shitao could be animated and re-vitalized with a 3D dimension, then would it be possible to bring new aesthetic perception and a new vision of human action and artistic plasticity? We leave it to for an answer from the project 'Body Brush - For Generating Virtual 3D Painting' developed by the Department of Computer Science and the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong , together with Mr. Young Hay, and look forward to a new conceptual realizations that will bring a new realm of the art of painting.

TANG Hoi-chiu
Curator (Modern Art)
Hong Kong Museum of Art