" I hope that the sort of conversation arises from that could actually transcend the difference or maybe the division, and help us to maybe find ways to talk about the commonality of humanity, which is what I care more about in my work in general. "
Conversation with
SNOW YUNXUE FU, NYU
Snow Yunxue Fu is a New Media Artist, Curator, and Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Using topographical computer-rendered images and installations, her practice merges historical, post-photographic, philosophical, and painterly explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime. Working with post-photographic imaging technologies such as 3D simulation, AR, XR, and the metaverse, her practice echoes the investigations of historical Chinese and Western painters who peered into our capacity to experience the sublime in nature. With a background in traditional Chinese and Western abstract painting, Fu saw her transition a decade ago into new media as a natural extension of her technical and conceptual research. As a female Chinese American immigrant, she lives an international dialogue and a felt betweenness, through which she investigates our shared humanity through the lens of technology.
Fu’s work has exhibited globally in the Venice Architecture Biennale, Times Square ZAZ Billboard, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pioneer Works, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, the NADA Art Fair, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Pearl River Delta Art News. She has presented her research at School of the Art Institute of Chicago; University of Chicago; China Academy of Art, Tsinghua University; SIGGRAPH; SIGGRAPH Asia; International Symposium on Electronic Art; Chinese American Art Faculty Symposium; and The Center of Chinese Art at William Paterson University. Most recently, she has built and curated exhibitions and events in the VR WSPark - Metaverse Exhibition Project, co-hosted by the DSLCollection. Her work has been collected by the Duende Art Museum in Guangdong, China; Ellen and Richard Sandor Family Collection; Current Museum of Art; multiple NFT collections, and, at the age of five, by the National Art Museum of China.
Run - Valley City Art Game Recording Ground Level (Take 1)
Wantong Yao: First of all, can you tell us about yourself? How do you identify yourself as an artist?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Thanks for having me. I am Snow Yunxue Fu. I am a new media artist who is based in New York City right now and I am also the assistant arts professor here at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Photo and Imaging Department. I mainly make work in 3D imaging, post-photographic, new media installations, or screen-based work, and that is the medium I teach here at NYU Tisch. Besides being an artist and teacher, I also curate a number of projects relating to this medium and as well as in the community of people that I involve with. Many of them are my former students.
Wantong Yao: Would you briefly elaborate on the philosophy or methodology behind your work? What do you think is the most important when it comes to creating a project?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Sure. It probably makes a lot of sense for me to mention that my background is actually a lot of more classic mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, and when I actually first approached new media art over a decade ago as a student, actually when I was doing the grad school at the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), I was really excited to find this open-endedness that new media like 3D is able to provide. Lots of issues that I was running into when I continued pursuing painting was that oftentimes even my professor may say “you are interested in doing this but 100 other people have done that. You should check them out and they’ve probably done it really well.” Of course, the recommendation is a positive one so that one can learn and have dialogues with what took place before, but sometimes I've felt also really restrained in terms of mediums like painting, sculpture, and even photography. I think there are so many kinds of establishment so in a sense, it's a little bit harder for artists who were just coming into the scene to even open up the possibility. Of course, there are many who are doing that but when I was able to come to new media art, there's just a lot more interdisciplinarity that I really find myself loving and I'm not so constrained towards just one frame of dialogue. All of the sudden I can bring in actually painting, photography, sculpture and also animation, film, new media installation, VR, AR into this medium that can encompass everything. So in terms of philosophy, that kind of open-endedness I think is always what I'm looking for and also what I'm trying to instore in my students.
For medium that is more around the scene for a while, one can still approach it with a fresh perspective and ways to consider it in our day and age. You know that our society or the situation now we find ourselves in is always very different. Then there are other people who might want to do similar things in another time and space, and I would say like being experimental is a key for being creative. Obviously, with new media art in 3D, there are a lot of technical things that one needs to be a well-versed and even get updated every single year because technology changes and even the software itself has upgrades, but then there's also the kind of new tools that is coming into the scene all the time. I think one need to be open to also learn new languages, even just within new media art there are so many more things to explore. So when it comes to creating a project, it is this idea of being playful, exploratory, experimental and creative. Obviously, as an artist, especially a professional one, after a while you established a certain kind of context where you would like to communicate about what you think about, but I really don't like to repeat myself. I think life is full of so many new things and so is the whatever insights artists can bring to the table.
So every time I create a project, I think about it as my best project. My best project is always gonna be my next project and so I think with that, of course, staying true and essential to what I'm interested in talking about. Of course there are the main ways of expression, main mediums of expression, so while there is kind of a deepening in the research and the approaches, there is also a kind of a wide-open approach in terms of oh, maybe there's always other things that I can learn or I can have my team learned in terms of making this next projects. So that will be my summary for the second question.
Wantong Yao: Does your identity as an Asian female artist influence your practice?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Yes, and I would say probably the extent of it, or maybe the realization of that does vary at different moments in life or situations. In a sense, my project doesn't start with that but of course, it starts with that because my project is from me and I am Asian and I am a female artist. But you know as you will see in my project, most of them don't really have this kind of visual signifier, at least from the surface that you would say “oh. it must be a Asian female artist who created it.” And I think my interest in dialoguing is also broader, as I often consider my project not only towards just the art world but also a broader, public and global contexts as well. And a lot of my work actually has to do with this idea of human beings positioned in a larger world, whether it's sort of reflected in like paintings from China or Europe in the Renaissance, this idea of the sublime, but nowadays the sort of upgraded towards a very technological world where the space that we get confronted every day is not the physical space but also often time the virtual space like we are all in right now.
So reflecting this idea of techno-sublime, I think that does in the sense transcend artist identity but obviously because I'm the one who's talking about it I will find maybe some of my project compared to others will probably have more of the highlights in terms of my specificity. And I would say maybe the most recent project that I'm starting this year probably has the highest percentages of this idea of my identity, since I'm forming this avatar called Daughter Ice, after both me and my mother as the original format. But then as a digital human, she also stands for a wider sort of contexts and using this as a way to find space or even create spaces on the Metaverse to communicate ideas about intimacy and especially this experience through separation of the physicality, like me and my mother we haven't seen each other for over 2 years now mainly because of the pandemic. But you know this sort of relationship that we still maintain in terms of personal relationship but also she is my original art teacher and then she still inspires me even now both as an artist and as a teacher. So I think Daughter Ice is this kind of virtual daughter of me, so part of the personal narratives comes in even more. And I will say that besides this project I think many of my other project does utilize female body form or sometimes even more then even just body forms, or one may say there's a lot of fluid environment kind of elements that perhaps associate more with feminine sensitivity. So I can kind of see that possibililty playing out, although I think for me it's less important to forcibly make that happen. Naturally this is what I gravitate towards and visually it's what I want to make.
And I think the Chinese part, the Asian part too comes in naturally. Again, I felt like the way that I approach my artwork or even maybe this idea of culture to me is sort of a more fluid definition. I think if we look at history right now, we may fell like certain culture is very concrete in terms of their attributes but there's so many variables throughout history that something could have happened very differently where whatever we know about that culture could be very very different now. So culture influences culture right, like throughout again history and regions and so, I think some cultural elements if one may identify that can definitely come in very naturally into my artwork. Like I am using this image as my virtual background (for video conference), it is not my artwork but I really really really like it and one may say, “oh this is really Asian, it’s kind of a watercolor and it's kind of this beautiful cherry blossoms scene,” but you know they're also beautiful cherry blossom scene in the park next to New York University. So I think in summary, I do think my identity influences my artwork profoundly, but it is one that I think or I hope is authentic and one that because of the specificity of who I am and also living in this mixed culture, to say as pursuing higher education in America even though growing up all the way right from China and also being a professional artist based here in the U.S, although still with this outlook of talking to people from China and from everywhere else in the world. I hope that the sort of conversation arises from that could actually transcend the difference or maybe the division, and help us to maybe find ways to talk about the commonality of humanity, which is what I care more about in my work in general.
Run - Valley City Art Game Recording Ground Level (Take 2)
Keyi Zhang: In your practice, have you ever experienced a situation where you want to experiment with a new medium?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Yeah, I think I touched upon it a little bit earlier. Certain things that we learn about or we are sort of really used to using in making artworks sometimes might not be the best to make a certain project. So yeah I definitely come across this all the time. In a way, I think it’s essential for me as an artist to stay engaged to kind of be intentionally seeking new mediums, to think about what other language I can utilize in terms of, you know, talking about things that I care about. Or sometimes new mediums provide another set of vocabularies, or audiences that you’re already familiar with doesn’t have. So I would say it’s consistent, and I think also relating to me being an educator too, you know even though sometimes I do teach similar topics in different semesters, but every year, I do try to update my syllabus, so even within the conceptual and technical context like “what is going on right now”, for example, how does fluid simulation is developed this year compared with maybe two years ago when I was teaching a similar class. Within that sort of a smaller scale, as constantly inquiring, like maybe there is a new 3D software I should utilize now rather than the other one. But sometimes it might be like, oh I haven’t really done too many AR projects, this digital human project made a lot of sense with its first state to have an AR version of it, so expanding that, and then eventually making it into an Instagram filter so that it’s accessible to everybody on the internet to view. So definitely.
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Keyi Zhang: Before teaching at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, you also taught 3D and game design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Can you share a little bit about your experience of teaching at SAIC? What do you think is the biggest difference between teaching at the two schools?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Yeah, love teaching at SAIC! First of all the students there. I love the school in so many different ways even when I was in the position of learning. The opportunity arrived when I finished my first-year graduate school, I was offered to start teaching as an adjunct at SAIC after I graduate my MFA program, that was also something that going into my second year I tried to prepare for. Beforehand, I always had this idea that I want to teach at a university, too. Fortunately, I got to teach at SAIC very soon after that. I love the students at SAIC, and they are very unique. I noticed that more as I start teaching at other schools. So even when I was living in Chicago, I was also teaching at UIC and Northern Central College, and other institutions. So even back then I started noticing obviously SAIC students are also different, but in general, that is a broad summarization, they are very creative, they are very sensitive, and they can be very serious with their artworks. And oftentimes I think, maybe because of the admission process which I was also involved with at SAIC for a few years, how does the school attract people? You know I think, we get what one may call the natural artist type or one or five percent of the general population in the world that are artists, they are very likely to come to SAIC. So I loved that, in the sense, there is relatability, because I feel like I am one of them and I learn from them. I understand where their comments come from, where their approaches come from, where their weirdness comes from, and where their craziness comes from.
So yeah, I love that aspect, and because I taught very long studio classes which were research-based, critical study classes, I got to spend a lot more time with my students on a weekly basis, and there were a lot of communications that happened in classes, with artwork making especially you get to know people beyond the surface like “how are you”. It’s wonderful to see and follow so many of my SAIC students doing interesting wonderful things after I left SAIC or they’ve graduated and some of them are teaching and also being professional artists in the world. Just to be able to see that they can have this longevity also. There is probably a lot more percentages of students from SAIC will stick along in a way in the art world and engage in creative practice.
Compared to SAIC, the students pool at NYU is different. In a way, I have now been at NYU for almost three years. In general, NYU students are more academic, even though I am teaching at the Tisch School of Art, I can still kind of sense that. Obviously, you are also gonna have eccentric artist type you will find in SAIC. But in general, the focus is not just art at NYU, and I think this is highly related to the curriculum that they are exposed to. In a school like NYU, even as an art major, you have to take social science and all type of different things. Compare with SAIC, as interdisciplinary as it is, it’s mainly art mediums the students have to be concerned about. I love my NYU students for different reasons, as they are definitely very creative. And I will say in general in a slightly different way, working with them in terms of research and establishing more of a professional frameworks, things to kind of being a very fruitful place. In a way, I can’t really compare them all the time. Obviously, ever since I started teaching at NYU, I adjusted my curriculum to kind of fit the students here.
I do really love teaching different students in a way because their differences in a sense also enriches me as an educator and an artist. I enjoy different types of relationships and communication, and I do find ways, both SAIC and NYU students, a lot of my thesis students, to know about and to see where they will go after graduation.
Run - Valley City Art Game Recording Ground Level (Take 3)
Keyi Zhang: Have you brought part of your teaching experience into your work?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Definitely, and I would even say the more I am teaching, the more intentional I am about, this idea of two-way street. And obviously, as a teacher, I bring a lot of content, technique skill, and frameworks for them to research and grow in, and besides the demo and assigning readings, oftentimes my classes are very engaged and they have choices especially relating to research, that they can kind of look into different areas within the class. So instead of me giving lectures about that, I would more like to give a framework of dialogue, and then have them find more about their need and their interests, and oftentimes, very updated ones cause you know every new year, every new generation, as you see, they are approaching the medium 3D a little bit differently. Nowadays you see little babies barely able to speak, but they are so fluent in terms of clicking 3D images on their parents’ iPads, they are really digital-native. In general, there is more fluency when they come to 3D first time as a maker, they understand where it is already from experience and the ways they are subscribed to images growing up whether through film or commercials.
For example, in my newest development project Daughter Ice, a lot of things that I try to pinpoint in this project come from some of the conversations of my emerging media studio digital body class I was teaching last semester, which was the first time I was teaching it at NYU, although I taught similar classed at SAIC, for me to find comfort points and I feel really inspired by the brilliant minds that I find in the classes.
One more thing I want to add, it is a two-way street, so in this dialogue, I can offer so much of my experiences and my students can engage in those frameworks, and make work from those frameworks. As a teacher, oftentimes it’s the inspiration we give to the students, but like vise versa too. But obviously, I’m very careful in terms of not taking other people’s ideas, but more about being inspired by the conversation. I think it’s very important for anybody, especially teachers who often find themselves in a more power dynamic. None of my work has to do with taking ideas from my students or anything like that, but the experience, the conversation, and the spark.
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Keyi Zhang: April 2nd was the opening for your curatorial project VR WSPark, the Senior Thesis Virtual Exhibition for NYU Tisch students. How do you usually curate a virtual exhibition? What do you think is the value of virtual curation, especially during the pandemic era?
Snow Yunxue Fu: So it will probably be helpful to talk a little bit about the VR WSPark project first and then the senior thesis show is actually the second exhibition we are able to open in the virtual space on the Metaverse. VR WSPark came into fruition last year, actually approached by the DSL collection which is an art collection that is based in Paris, France They've been around since 2005 and they are really interesting too because it's a family with one of the founders Sylvain Levy and his wife and now his daughter Karen Levy being the main person who's running it. The initial approach was to actually collect contemporary Chinese artists work and they've gone about that for many years and and the more recent years they slightly shifted the focus but also are supporting lots of artwork that made with mediums or tools of technology. They approached me and this idea of VR WSPark came to me, basically a virtual version of the Washington Square park.
The VR platform right now we're using is called Sansar and one of the reasons why I choose Washington Square park as the reference has to do with the park's history. Obviously it's also really important in terms of the New York City landscape and it's right next to NYU Manhattan campus, and then it is also this cultural hub where lots of performers, comedians, singers and visual artists come together. It’s a park that gets often time used as a stage for cultural events or in the literature a lot of time will get referencing. It is this kind of cultural and social gathering space, but when it was first formed, it was actually also associateing with another epidemic that New York was experiencing hundred years ago, which was the yellow fever. People were migrating down to where the park is now and so many people were dying that it ended becoming this potter’s field, which means it's a massive grave. Then there forming the park and obviously they transformed this place from this horrible experience that New York had to now this kind of support for the New Yorkers in contemporary times.
And the pandemic we are experiencing now has a lot of parallel towards that, like we're not safe when gathering in a large number anymore and even as New York right now is trying to open it is actually still really unsafe to check out openings or exhibitions. So losing this contact of gathering and seeing art, and I think one of the things pandemic did was this kind of functioning as a catalyst for not only using the internet for entertainment, but it's now the place where we work and meet, also where we look at art and be creative. VR WSPark is resembling the physical Washington Square park in that way too. With digital avatar we can safely meet and it can even go up to thousands of avatars. So the potential is huge. And I think also just this idea of looking at art, obviously no one cannot really be able to look at physical art like we used to be. While I do not think that the virtual way of looking at art will necessarily have to replace other means of experiencing art or making art, I think there is a lot of added value in terms of ways we can engage with artworks online, especially artwork that is digitally born already, made in 3D and made in new media.
For our first show, I've curated ten emerging artists who all happen to be my former students from NYU and we had giant screen setting out not only in the fountain area which is a key area in the park, but also throughout the whole park. Physically, if we were to do that in the park it's almost impossible in terms of money and weather, but in the Metaverse we can design this space as much as the system allowed, like finding this balance of doing whatever you want while the platform is able to. Going back to this concept of post-photo is that a 3D virtual space can reference a physical space and often time it does because that's how the 3D software is built, but then we can also do many other things that are almost impossible or otherwise different than the physical park, so it provides more opportunities. For the first show we installed sculptures like 3D objects, we had still images on giant scale and then we also have moving images screening. Anybody who downloads Sansar on their PC computer (unfortunately it doesn't work on Macs), it's like downloading a free game app and you can then interact with it. And then also it's completely VR enabled, so you can connect virtual reality goggles and look at all of the artwork in scale with your avatar.
The senior thesis show is the recent show that we just got opened. Lots of graduation and even commencements nowadays are modified and I think as an artist the thesis show is such an important one, and sometimes it goes online sometimes, it's like a very limited access or sometime it's just replaced by a website. So being able to bring the show into a Metaverse space I think offers more opportunity for the work to be seen. It’s not limited to location. Anybody with Internet can get down to it and look around the work. It’s not limited also by time. The show is going to be up for longer than the usual senior thesis show. It also has to do with the place where the students are working too. Ever since I came to NYU in my Photo & Imaging Department it really comes to trying to establish post-photo 3D imaging new media curriculums, so lots of student are equipped with the understanding of 3D imaging, and a lot of their work were already about that. To see the work in this virtual space just makes so much more sense. We were able to see it altogether yesterday. We had our online opening, the youtube live recording is still available online if any of the audiences wants to watch it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9gJNiwzls8). The Sansar link is live too now so I highly encourage everybody to visit there as well.
Trailer of VR WSPark Metaverse Exhibition Project with DSLCollection on Sansar
Wantong Yao: Talking about virtual exhibition, do you think that metaverse is a hype, or is it the near future? As a new media artist and educator, what is your view or approach towards the metaverse?
Snow Yunxue Fu: I think with the way popular media is approaching it, there's definitely a lot of hype about it, although there are also so much potential with it. From the perspective of a practicing artist, an educator, and a curator, I can see so much, so much potential that is already taking place in a way as the virtual senior thesis show, I would say what we're doing is probably quite unique even in the landscaper of New York or globally in some ways. Examples like the show provide more ways to engage with each other, and with the artwork. Our society in general on a global scale is getting more and more technological. The way that we basically live with our phone, most of us do have our phone almost 24/7, we are probably already living out a life that's closer to the concept of Metaverse than we realize. This kind of simultaneity of the physical and the virtual world, especially I think the younger generation gets it, like it's not necessarily even a competition, although if not framed carefully it could not always be a good thing. I think we can't be naive in terms of what life can look like or the important issues like security and health, all of the things needs to be considered, but if we are already kind of there, if we're heading even more, I think the more important issue is how do we design future, how do we design engagement, where again humanity is put in the center, that we don't become slaves of technology rather that this is a new means where more positive things can be bought out. Zoom is like a good example of web 2.0 where we're still very flat, but you know web 3.0 we could all be having holograms projected around ourselves when we're having meetings like this. I think there are so many interesting and creative things that we can do if that technology does become a every-day device such as a smartphone is right now for a lot of us.
But I think there is also a down point and I certainly don't want to minimize that. In short, I think this idea of gamification of our life because if things are a lot more structured virtually, the ways that society operate are going to feel and look more like setting up a game. One example is NFTs, a good example of money being within blockchain and Bitcoin acts as this kind of game that sometimes people play. And in the art world, artists are being very much affected by that. While some of the artists really benefited from it, as their artwork gets exposed to more audience and digital artists especially get more support in terms of ways their work is being purchased as NFTs, there's also a lot of people who were not positioning art in the center, and a lot more about playing with money and money laundry even. So how does one protect themselves in this? Really recently, I think April 1st, somebody like Jay Chou his NFT got stolen, so even somebody like him like a public figure gets affected by this. So the more we use these technologies the more we really need to understand them, the more we need to not only understand them we need to know how to engage and actually how to build them. Maybe we shouldn’t just let the big companies be the one who is building our future. That's one of the aspects coming down to being an educator, I really want to educate and well-verse my student and others to understand this is something that's very much formed by humans so when we're designing something, we're creating something, what is the central value here? Are we turning people into slaves? Are we looking at each other just as a means to an end? How do we understand complex ideas such as intimacy? How do we understand relationship or even how do we understand a body? so I think it's this idea of understanding the way that physical world works really actually inform us in making a better future, where a world of the physical and the digital, there's a in a word for it, “the phygital future” or the Metaverse, sometimes those terms are interchangeable, how can it really benefits and what central value that we're highlighting if we are to build this future together, and you know more diverse voices too. Coming back to this idea of the VR WSPark, it is a small park in a sense that is in the corner of the Metaverse right now, and we are really trying to approach it very experimentally and creatively. Hopefully even through that engagement, it provides education, it provides understanding. It is really something that all of us can put our hands in it and avoid those possible dystopia that so many novels or even movies are trying to warn us about. To me, I think it's not a black or white, I think very much so it comes down to who and how we are forming it.
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Wantong Yao: What is interdisciplinary? What does it mean to be interdisciplinary?
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Snow Yunxue Fu: I certainly encourage young artists to be interdisciplinary and I actually say this is probably gonna need to be a lifelong thing. I think you know the best artists never stop learning, so you know not only interdisciplinary within art, incurious about anything. You know at the moment that we felt like “oh that's it”, we don't grow anymore. It's, I think, an unfortunate place to be there if so many people are that. And sometimes I would just say like it breaks my heart when I see young people saying that “I am just this, this is all I do how I'm defined” Therefore they don't provide any possibility for themselves to come to the better version, I would just say. So as artist as a person, I think it's so keen to always stay open minds obviously. I think at a certain stage of life we will establish our core values and be confident and be okay with that. So you will have that establishment will around you, based on like your research based upon like your worldview. But don't let that be a closed box.
You know I think frameworks and boxes help us to go up the tower right used to be built but don't close the door behind you, don’t close the window and opened up bridges and you would then sell more enrichment to. The more enrichment you are, the better artist you’ll be.
“Cavern-Us” Screen Based Walk-Through with Sound of Solo AR Exhibition on V-Art App
Wantong Yao: Do you consider your practice interdisciplinary? If so, why?
Snow Yunxue Fu: Yes yes definitely. Maybe one way to approach that is my output of the artwork is very interdisciplinary. Sometimes it could be installations. I think there was a while after I was very much engaged in making images in 3D on the computer. I really wanted to bring my images back to the physical world so it was important for me to imprisonment them through not only monitors and projectors but also structured like sculptures or architectural environments where the viewer is really engaging with the work not only just with their eyes but also, with the other senses, even with the body as like a ruler or a gap shape that I'm creating with walls where you can only see a little my artwork hidden behind the curve of the walls. Then now the work can be experienced in VR so you don't have to walk in somewhere, you can just wear a headset and then you're somewhere else, dealing with spacing in different ways. And you know the work can be printed, back to the material, and not only be 2D printed images on the wall but it could again be 3D printed as objects. And 3D itself, I think and I’ve mentioned this before, it’s such an interdisciplinary medium. 3D environment or 3D software could be kind of considered this epistemological model of the world, ways like even gravity needs to be simulated in the 3D space. You don't put gravity in there, then there is no such thing as gravity, not everything falls on the ground, right? You have to put colliders on them. I think you look at the way our world is structured, our natural world if I may say, and then you look at the world that we're trying to reflect in 3D. It really goes into so many areas of our life.
For animation, for example, It's really interesting to look at everybody's movements and I think often time we take our body for granted in a way that, for example, I'm talking with my hand or somebody walking, we don't really think too much about it but we're animating it! The hand is one of the most complicated things to animate right so so there is kind of interdisciplinary in the sense of like now we have to study motion and now we have to study biology! I appreciate 3D in that way too because it does provides me kind of more the care to like how complex and wonderful this world we are inhabiting. Trees are one of the most amazing machines if you think, and it’s impossible to replicate because on one end it takes in CO2, and it goes through a process and then gives us oxygen! Most of the machine that human-made is very much the other way: we take oxygen and then provide pollution! Studying the makeup of the world or studying even how our eyes work, you know that we think of simulation technology so wonderful or like in a hyper-realistic we can sometimes even tell whether it's real photographed or simulated, how our eye functions like the preciseness in a sense like eye is kind of the simulation machine.
So definitely consider myself an interdisciplinary artist and I'm very happy to be one, and maybe I'll just end with this. I felt like one of the things that I really love about, also SAIC is key in terms of interdisciplinary, while I think like it's not completely an abolishment of majors and departments, which we need to have some sort of anchor, a part of human civilization and culture building, and all language building. But you know again I think with the emphasis of being interdisciplinary, the mixed-up and the mashup provide so much more potentials and new ways, that we can share or express something a little bit better.
INTERVIEWER: WANTONG YAO, KE ZHANG
EDITOR: WANTONG YAO, KE ZHANG