Artist Statement
June 9-30, Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau, presented by Niio.art. Public event.
Karst is virtual reality artwork that creates a liminal space in between the representational and the theatrical, the limited and the multi-dimensional, and the abstract and the real. The work is inspired by Snow Yunxue Fu’s personal childhood experiences of visiting the caves in her hometown in Southwest China. The memories and the impact of those experiences are still quite vivid, where the space feels both claustrophobic and expansive. The limited edition on Sedition is video capture of the virtual reality experience from a user’s perspective inside the cave.
The cave space embodies both aspects of natural formation and human intervention. On the one hand, the Karst caves are a display the formation of the rocks over a long period of time, much longer than any average civilization or human lifespan. The rock formations in the virtual scene are created using fluid simulation software, Realflow where water plays a natural role in sculpting the physical shapes of the caves along with the calcium accumulation over thousands of years. On the other hand, the caves are often lit up by artificial and saturated decorative lights; a decision made by the tourism department for groups of explorers to better see the breathtaking rock formations.
In recent years, the Chinese government have found the conditions of the caves are favourable for holding big data hardware as a naturally climate-controlled environment and other safety factors. While more and more personal data is now being stored inside the mountains of Fu’s hometown, the artist felt the desire to recreate her childhood memories of the caves as a digital VR environment. The experience enables people to explore the caves and bring attention into the multi-layered digital nature of our contemporary human life. The spatial sound echoes in between the natural sounds in the cave and the hypothetical operational noises of machines. The experience in the digital cave attempts to embody the concept of the Plato’s cave in the medium of virtually contracted realm, providing a contemplative environment for the visitor to wonder; walking and teleporting within the control of the wireframed virtual hands that are given to them.
Karst is a continuation of Fu’s artistic interests in creating virtual reality pieces that explore the idea of the techno sublime, relating to Chinese and Western landscape paintings, as well as the technological culture changing the way humans live in the contemporary technological culture. Karst was created with the assistance of Arne Muraoka and Ming Rang Bai with sound by Daniel Brookman. [Source: Vimeo.com]
- Snow Yunxue Fu (b. 1987, China) is an International New Media Artist who lives and works in New York City, USA. Fu is also an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography and Imaging. 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. With a background in painting, Fu remains the youngest artist collected by the National Art Museum of China. She sees her transition into new media as a natural extension of her conceptual research in which she draws parallels between the physical, metaphysical, digital, and multi-dimensional spaces. Fu’s artwork has been shown internationally in solo shows, group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals including the New York Gallery of Chinese Art, New York; Ars Electronica, Austria; Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy; Pioneer Works, New York; NADA Art Fair, New York; Sediton, Hong Kong; Arebyte Gallery, London, UK; Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, China; Current Museum of Art, New York, Thoma Art House, Santa Fe; Currents Santa Fe New Media Art Festival, New Mexico; The Wrong Biennale, and etc. Her work has also been collected by the Currents Museum of Art in New York. Her work reviews and interviews have been covered in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Arebyte on Screen, Sedition, the St. Louis Magazine Art Review, Guangzhou Today’s Focus in China, and etc. She has formerly taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and etc. She obtained a M.F.A. degree from the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also obtains a B.F.A. degree in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Southeast Missouri State University, and a B.A. in Fine Art from Sichuan Normal University in China. (Source: https://vimeo.com/snowfu)