Art exhibition of 3D animation pioneer opens in Beijing

"Bounded and unbounded", a solo art exhibition of Joy Cheng, opened on June 8 in Today Art Museum, Beijing to last until July 4.

Curated by Gu Zhenqing, a contemporary art critic and independent curator, the exhibition features four series of works created by artist Joy Chengin in recent years: God of Ants, Breaking, Light and One.

Joy Cheng, who holds a PhD in advertising from Communication University of China, was one of the first 3D animation designers and contemporary artists in China.

As early as 1991, Cheng was doing three-dimensional animation in China. After 2014, she fell in love with pen and canvas, and expressed the abstract spirit of meditation through quiet and poetic concrete objects and their countless superimpositions of color, light and shadow.

Since 2019, she has created four series of works: God of Ants, Breaking, Light and One. In accordance with free will, she carries out ideological experiments, breaks away from existing knowledge conventions and institutional inertia, combs and integrates the different root thinking between China and the West in a highly abstract way, and constantly upgrades and refreshes symbolic texts, coding a language and concept pedigree of her personal creations, so as to make the practice of art a kind of knowledge integrated within herself, gradually entering a unity of knowledge and practice.

“The four series of my exhibition express my questioning of the super philosophical problems of man and nature, Tao and law, and my experience and understanding of the bound up material world and the boundlessness of the dimension of wisdom,” Cheng said.

Experts say that the vivid charm and spiritual energy embodied in Cheng's works is a kind of confirmation of the artist's skill, taste, patterns and cultivation. Only by deeply reading and appreciating Cheng's works can people gradually appreciate her metaphorical expression of the monism of physical existence and spiritual existence, and feel her obscure presentation of the universe and the mind resonating on the same frequency. In her works, language is bound and consciousness is unbound.

Joy Cheng, Contemporary artist, part-time art professor of the University of Electronic Science and Technology, chairman of the Cheng Siwei Foundation of the University Education Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, chairman of the Love Torch Foundation of China Siyuan Project Poverty Alleviation Foundation, and director of Server Art and doctor of advertising of the Communication University of China.

Lu Hongyan contributed to the story.