Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Hsu Tung Han is a Chinese sculptor who carves statues out of Coastal Cypress. This may seem like a far cry from game screenshots, but there is a digital element to his woodcarving – pixelation.
His more recent work seems to catch people in the process of being digitized. Is he saying, "I am an analog man in a digital world"? Or is he seeing our coming evolution to something transhuman? In "Magician" (above, all titles featured here translated from the Chinese) most of his body is still resolved, and the pixelation is concentrated around his upper body, that part of the anatomy that interacts most with the digital.
In "Slip and Slide" (below) the pixelation seems more ominous, as though it in the process of transitioning the subject into a prison, behind the window looking out at the world:

Of course, he could be dematerializing, in the process of freeing himself, but the feeling of imprisonment is stronger, perhaps because his hand reaches through the window.
His most recent work features animals, a horse and a crane. Clearly, they are not losing themselves inside games, but perhaps we have lost our connection to them. Rather than riding a real horse, we ride one in a video game. Here we have a traditional subject of Chinese art, something from the past transformed into the digitized future. It is so white because it was carved from arborvitae.
He's an experimenter. In his non-pixelated work he has a sculpture, "Bow Bowing", that seems right out of "Guernica"...
... but then he has Childhood Past that seems almost like Buddha on a bike:
See all his works on Flickr here.
See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter or on her blog.
Comments