Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website BMW announces collaboration with Acute Art to realize a project with BMW Art Journey awardee Lu Yang. Lu Yang presents latest artworks in Art Basel's “OVR: Miami Beach”
dicembre 04, 2020 - BMW

BMW announces collaboration with Acute Art to realize a project with BMW Art Journey awardee Lu Yang. Lu Yang presents latest artworks in Art Basel's “OVR: Miami Beach”

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Munich/London/Miami Beach. In cooperation with Acute Art and as long-term global partner of Art Basel, BMW will showcase the latest artworks of Lu Yang, BMW Art Journey awardee of 2019. The Shanghai-based artist is represented by Société, Berlin. From December 2 to 6, 2020, Art Basel will present “OVR: Miami Beach”, the latest edition of the show’s Online Viewing Rooms. The digital platform will feature galleries accepted to the 2020 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach and will be accompanied by a program of online events, including talks and gallery walk-throughs.

In collaboration with Acute Art, leading producer of visionary virtual and augmented reality (AR) artworks, and Lu Yang, BMW will present a new AR work where “DOKU”, the artist’s digital avatar, takes over the physical world in the form of a giant dancing superhero. The installation, titled “Gigant DOKU”, is developed by a game engine and incorporates motion capture image data from Tokyo and Bali gathered during the artist’s BMW Art Journey. The Augmented Reality Experience is available on Acute Art App. Please find the instructions for the app at the end of this text.

„For me as an artist who has been working on digital art projects for many years now, it is a great honor to gain the possibility of working with Acute Art. They are the leading producer of visionary AR artworks and have been working with so many successful artists in the field of AR before. During my BMW Art Journey, I had the chance to cooperate with different artists from several backgrounds and to deepen my research in motion capture technologies – knowledge and material that I can now use for my artworks. Even though I had to pause my travels due to the coronavirus, I am thankful that I am now able to proceed digitally, with the full support and creative freedom provided by the BMW Group,” says Lu Yang.

“We are so excited to work with Lu Yang, one of China’s most prominent young artists, who explores new immersive media to create poetic works that bridge the disciplines. The BMW Art Journey ‘Human Machine Reverse Motion Capture Project’ demonstrates his keen interest in the anthropology of dance into the virtual sphere employing cutting-edge motion-capture technology and robotics. Due to the global pandemic, his physical voyage to Indonesia, India, and Japan had to be adjusted but through a collaboration with Acute Art his dancing avatars can travel across the world digitally. AR makes interactive versions of his dancing figures possible, the first of which will be launched on the Acute Art app in conjunction with ‘OVR: Miami Beach’. Anyone who has downloaded the free app can interact with this dematerialized dancer and place him anywhere, film him and share his performance with friends globally. For an artist concerned with how the human body can overcome its physical limitations, this AR project represents an important step into the era of virtual art and curation,” says Daniel Birnbaum, Artistic Director, Acute Art.

The hard-edged, kinetic animations and paintings of Lu Yang (b. 1984) deploy the latest digital tools to fuse Chinese cultural and spiritual influences with distinctive imagery inspired by manga comics, contemporary youth and gaming subcultures. Trained at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and continuing to undertake studies in robotics, the artist is equally at home with traditional dance and performance practices as with futuristic notions about an emerging post-gender and post-human society in which the lines between the objective and metaphysical world are completely blurred. His distinctive body of work is an example of strikingly new visions emerging from a young generation of artists in today’s technologically advanced China.

Lu Yang’s BMW Art Journey entitled “Human Machine Reverse Motion Capture Projec" examines how the human body can be trained to overcome its physical limitations and explores its deployment in historical and present-day cultures. His research looks into how humans negotiate their evolving relationship with machines that may ultimately surpass human limitations. During his trip to Bali, Indonesia, in January 2020, Lu Yang employed sophisticated motion-capture devices to record dancer’s gestures, including facial, finger- and eye-capture techniques. These latest technological devices collected and analyzed the subtlest body movements and can mimic them using robotic technologies.

All works on view in “OVR: Miami Beach” relate to and are inspired by Lu Yang’s BMW Art Journey, which has continued in the digital realm after the novel coronavirus made it difficult to visit some of the originally planned destinations. More broadly, the selected works highlight the artist’s creative evolution in recent years, leading up to a current body of work in which Lu Yang’s digital avatar has become the subject of his continuing digital journey. Together, the works transport viewers into a fictional universe like no other, in which centuries-old philosophical concerns about what it means to be human are investigated in a hypnotic, cohesive and often disquieting visual language.

All digital artworks of Lu Yang will be accessible for VIPs and public in “OVR: Miami Beach” from December 2, 10am ET, to December 6, midnight ET, via the following link: https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17306

To fully discover and experience the interactive artwork of Lu Yang “Gigant DOKU” (from December 2, 10am ET), the Acute Art app is available free of charge on the App Store or Google Play. To start the experience, please see the instructions below:

1. Scan the QR code (in the PDF attached) using your smartphone and download the Acute Art App via the App Store or Google Play.
2. Open the Acute Art app and select “Lu Yang”.
3. Select “Gigant DOKU” and then the “place” button.
4. Point your phone towards the floor and tap to place the work. Drag your finger across the screen to rotate it.

The Acute Art app uses cutting-edge technology that works best on high-end phones with the latest software. The devices supported are iPhone X or above, and Samsung Galaxy S8 or equivalent. The app requires a phone with a minimum of 4GB of memory and Apple iOS 11 or Android 8.0 Oreo (API 24) operating system.