Wonderland

Xiě Dòng Huà 寫動畫

(Writing Animation)

A collection of fleeting moments that capture attention and encourage a small adjustment of the xin 心 (heart/mind).

Wonder, beauty, nature… Neuroscience has identified childhood as a period of great cognitive growth and fecundity. Neuroplasticity is understood to be at its highest potential in this critical period of growth. Researchers have recently discovered a correlation between wonder (that childlike sense of awe and delight) and rich aesthetic experiences with a renewal of critical periods and cognitive development and repair.

I seek to make art that evokes wonder through the beauty of nature, creating work that can be positively impactful on the cognitive and physiological health of my audience. Neuroscientific research points us to the importance and value of nature as a source of well-being. It turns out, the regulating benefits of the natural world can extend to visual depictions of it as well as our in-real life experiences.

Through these animations of imagined landscapes, I draw audiences into moments of peace and wonder, much in the same way traditional Chinese painters did with their ink on rice paper landscapes. Since my first AI body of work ‘Xie Hua’ (写 畫), I’ve been looking forward to returning to the traditional subject of Chinese landscape painting through the novel medium of AI.

My textual prompts continue to be a deconstruction and re-contextualisation of the ancient Chinese instructional text on technique and aesthetics, the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual, first published in 1679. These AI invigorated responses result in artworks that illuminate, reanimate and imagine the past in glorious homage to tradition and technological experimentation. Now, using @Runwayml I have further extended this creative trajectory into animation, bringing these newly sprung gardens to life.

Closely referencing Chinese art history, I include my own signature seal, but each animation is also embedded with a colour matched DALL·E watermark rotated vertically as a second seal to reflect the genre of AI and add transparency of the medium.

Even with our machine-generated art, we whisper homage to the natural world, to the truth of its significance for us, of 𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 as Source. I create like a prayer for its preservation, not merely as a catalogue of our memories in its absence. I draw from the collective memory of our shared human experience and reverence for nature. I hope the work will not be a requiem for its disappearing state, but rather, a voice for its survival.