Austin Lee's Digital Love

As further evidence of the traction that VR is gaining in the art world, the director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Daniel Birnbaum, announced in July that he is stepping down from his prestigious post. The opportunity that lured him away? Director of Acute Art – a new company creating VR and AR art. After many years at the helm of some of the art world’s most time-honoured institutions, Birnbaum decided to hop on the tech train in search of “an adventure, a journey into the future.”

Writer KATYA LOPATKO

In Austin Lee’s world, the future has already landed. The selfprofessed artist and computer nerd blends traditional techniques, like drawing and painting, with newfangled technologies such as iPads, Photoshop, and 3D printing. The result is a creative process so dizzyingly modern that it would’ve made Van Gogh slice off his other ear. His large-scale paintings are typically born on his iPad screen before migrating over to the canvas, but Lee isn’t afraid to experiment as the mood strikes him – using his entire toolbox to tinker with the image to coax out its magic. The resulting pictures are bright, whimsical, and a little surreal, somewhere between figurative and abstract, with a touch of some quality reminiscent of Claymation, or perhaps 90s Microsoft Paint.

It’s only fitting that Lee thinks of his paintings as “sharing an isolated moment, keeping it alive, and making it timeless.” This is great paradox of the digital era; the same technologies that erase distances between us are also the ones setting us adrift in a virtual wasteland, making plugged-in but lonely islands out of us all. In his work, Lee shows how the technologies of our generation can help fight this isolation by harnessing them to create art with one timeless goal: to build bridges of humour and empathy between human beings.

Even the art world cannot escape the digital revolution. The effects of digital technologies – not to mention emerging technologies like virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) – are creeping into artists’ studios, as well as museums and galleries around the world. Take Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei, for example, who proved that new and old play well together when she designed BMW’s Art Car #18. Using AR and VR, Fei addressed the future of vehicular mobility through a meditation on the applications of traditional Chinese culture and spirituality.

Meanwhile, contemporary Chinese art collectors, Sylvain and Dominique Levy, have opted to unmoor their impressive collection from the traditional museum space by launching the dslcollection – a virtual reality museum that has traveled to art fairs around the world, bringing their larger-than-life pieces to the largest possible audience.