Artwork

All Energies Share a Same Source (2023)
Multimedia installation
Dimensions variable

The artist is a young student from the coastal area of Fujian Province. Ghosts and gods worshipping, and folk beliefs have been widespread on the many islands in the province. Divination, spiritual inquiry, Feng Shui, and ancestor worshipping seemed to be an integral part of life during the artist’s growing up. But the younger generation seems to have lost their sensitivity to tradition and folklore, even labelling them as feudal superstition. Perhaps with urbanisation and the advancement of science and technology, there is no place for our "mystics" in the new cities and media.

However, the artist attempts to rescue this system from the swell of modernism. After three months’ fieldwork and database construction, he tried to explore the wonderful integration of a visual language based on traditional charms with AI’s generative adversarial networks (GANs). Formally speaking, Kau Chim (lottery poetry) is used as the textual source, and mutual generation and learning between texts and symbols take place, thus offering the latter new world views and incorporating spiritual input into the statistical database as a new factor. In this way the artist tries to investigate the dispersal of folk culture, which might lead to new paths for the development of folklore.
 


Miracle Chen
Born in 2000 in Xiamen, Fujian Province, Miracle Chen is currently studying in the Experimental Art Department, the School of Transmedia, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Currently his works are mostly inspired by the strong folk culture of his hometown, and he is trying to explore the development of traditional folk culture in the contemporary context by building up his own database of folk culture, which is constructed through a combination of new technological means and anthropological methods.
 


location: University of Macau Museum of Art
01/09/2023~05/11/2023
Praça do Tap Seac, Edif. do Instituto Cultural, Macau
tel | 28366866
fax | 28366899
email | webmaster@icm.gov.mo