Influence of Global Aesthetics on Chinese Aesthetics: The Adaptation of Moxie and the Case of Dafen Cun

This article examines the practice of moxie or imitation in art in Chinese aesthetics, compares it with the Platonic notion of mimesis, and explicates its original meaning. I then trace its development from traditional painting to the late Qing export paintings in which traditional Chinese aesthetics was combined with Western perspectives to satisfy Western tastes. The discussion extends to the contemporary development of moxie in China by considering the case of Dafen Cun, an art village in Shenzhen that is famous for its copycat art practices. It explores how Dafen Cun has become a major exporter of copies of Western and Chinese paintings and how its artists achieve techniques comparable to the traditional methods of moxie while losing its original spirit. The final section reviews how global consumerism has exerted influences on moxie, which can only be justifiably approached in respective cultural and historical contexts

Developing Japanese Ikebana as a Digital Painting Tool via AI

[ICEC 2020]19th IFIP TC 14 International Conference, ICEC 2020, Xi'an, China, November 10–13, 2020, ProceedingsPart of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 12523)In this research, we have carried out various experiments to perform mutual transformation between a domain of Ikebana (Japanese traditional flower arrangement) photos and other domains of images (landscapes, animals, portraits) to create new artworks via CycleGAN, a variation of GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) - new AI technology that can perform deep learning with less training data. With the capability of achieving transformation between two image sets using CycleGAN, we obtained several interesting results in which Ikebana plays the role of a digital painting tool due to the flexibility and minimality of the Japanese culture form. Our experiments show that Ikebana can be developed as a painting tool in digital art with the help of CycleGAN and opens a new way to create digital artworks of high-abstracted level by applying AI techniques to elements from traditional culture

Eastern spirit in western form

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Systems Failure

“Systems Failure” is a substantial array of digitally created images centered on many social and ethical issues that go undetected for numerous people. Many within our society live in silent anguish, something that remains unseen and undiscussed by others. “Systems Failure” shows the outsider a brief look into this life. While some images may seem as if the ugly side of life is being brought out, they are concentrated on the strength of humans. The focus of these images is on those who are trying to endure situations in which many cannot see or even understand. I intend to bring the viewer into my imagery by combining a number of images into one solid cohesive piece. I will do this by using a variety of hand drawn, photographic and computer generated images, through this type of amalgamation I will be produce several signature images, the goal is to produce 20-25 images. Each individual image will be comprised of at least three different images, using Photomatrix and Photoshop the combined images will be set in a single composition. My first set of files or images are created using Photomatrix, this involves setting three layers of a digital image to bring out underlying details. When creating my final digital images or combining my HDR images I use Adobe CC, Photoshop. My PSD files will be merged for many contain 75 and upwards to 200 layers, this makes for extremely oversized files. Therefore each file/image will be merged as a single layer once all adjustments have been made. Final images will be printed on steel using no white, simply the steel will be utilized as a white. This allows the images to maintain a darker, look along with giving the image third dimensional appearance

Photography and Social Life: An Ethnography of Chinese Amateur Photography Online

This dissertation explores the ‘middle-brow’ (Bourdieu, 1990) photography practices of contemporary Chinese people in the digital era and how they produce, circulate, and consume photographic images on and off the Internet. Through participant observation and interviews with Chinese photo hobbyists and professionals working in the visual-Internet industry based in London, Beijing, or in the virtual world, it asks how the marriage between photography and the Internet in China has been similar to, or distinct from, its counterparts in the rest of the world, consolidating a vernacular photo-scape that has emerged alongside China’s booming Internet economy and socio-economic transformation over the past forty years. The research further addresses the agencies of both individuals and images, which determine what people want from photography in today’s China and what photography wants from this new networked, mediated society. The dissertation moves across persons, communities, organisations, and real and virtual sites, making it a multi-sited ethnography that traces social relations and ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (Marcus, 1995: 96). The thesis presents a panoramic picture of the everyday practices carried out by Chinese amateur photographers, who are often imagined and categorised as the country’s middle class. The study focuses on two main aspects. The first is the activity of amateur photography, including the conspicuous consumption of photographic equipment and participation in relevant events, as well as social behaviours on and off of Internet photography platforms. The second involves the judgement and appreciation of photographic images on sites such as Tuchong, focusing on various kinds of aesthetic strategies around and within photographic images. The combination of the two has helped photo hobbyists in China to shape their values, career paths, and new identities in the context of digitalisation and the rise of social media

Web-Based Dynamic Paintings: Real-Time Interactive Artworks in Web Using a 2.5D Pipeline

In this work, we present a 2.5D pipeline approach to creating dynamic paintings that can be re-rendered interactively in real-time on the Web. Using this 2.5D approach, any existing simple painting such as portraits can be turned into an interactive dynamic web-based artwork. Our interactive system provides most global illumination effects such as reflection, refraction, shadow, and subsurface scattering by processing images. In our system, the scene is defined only by a set of images. These include (1) a shape image, (2) two diffuse images, (3) a background image, (4) one foreground image, and (5) one transparency image. A shape image is either a normal map or a height. Two diffuse images are usually hand-painted. They are interpolated using illumination information. The transparency image is used to define the transparent and reflective regions that can reflect the foreground image and refract the background image, both of which are also hand-drawn. This framework, which mainly uses hand-drawn images, provides qualitatively convincing painterly global illumination effects such as reflection and refraction. We also include parameters to provide additional artistic controls. For instance, using our piecewise linear Fresnel function, it is possible to control the ratio of reflection and refraction. This system is the result of a long line of research contributions. On the other hand, the art-directed Fresnel function that provides physically plausible compositing of reflection and refraction with artistic control is completely new. Art-directed warping equations that provide qualitatively convincing refraction and reflection effects with linearized artistic control are also new. You can try our web-based system for interactive dynamic real-time paintings at http://mock3d.tamu.edu/.Comment: 22 page