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Digital flow

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Take Wong Chung-yu's digital media installations out of an art gallery and put them in a sci-tech expo and they wouldn't look out of place.

The Hong Kong artist uses sensory devices and computer programmes to create works that engage the audience on both artistic and technical levels. In When Time Flows Away (2010), for instance, Wong invites viewers to pour water into a narrow channel that runs between two large LCD screens. The top one shows an animation of a hand grinding a traditional ink stick while the one below displays digital photos of major Chinese historical figures and events over the past century. As the water hits the sensor-activated channel, 'virtual ink' infiltrates and trickles down the lower screen, eventually wiping out all the smudgy images below.

'It's not unlike an interactive game,' says the computer science graduate who turned 34 last week, 'but this is a commentary on how a culture can change over time. The ink represents a culture and the water represents time.'

The work is from Wong's latest solo exhibition 'Realm of Illusion' running at Hanart TZ Gallery in Central. Also on show is The Holy Mountain 5, another digital interactive work, which takes Chinese ink painting's fundamental principle of 'drawing the audience into the painting' literally. Through computer technology, viewers can venture on virtual tours into the moody, mountainous terrain Wong has created, a landscape covered in snow or shrouded in fog. And, as in real life, the weather in these digital paintings is just as unpredictable.

Wong says that with digital technology he can create work that is algorithmic and interactive. What separates his pieces from being mere 'digital games', he says, is his intention to make use of digital technology to move traditional ink painting into the 21st century and, in doing so, revive the art form.

Wong acknowledges that using Chinese ink in non-traditional ways is hardly new in contemporary art. Artists have splashed it around in performance art and combined it with Western aesthetics and vocabulary in paintings, while some have abandoned the ink brush altogether.

The idea of ink in the contemporary context is 'to use any tool or method to modernise the traditional Chinese art form', he says, 'but a lot of the experimenting is still confined to two-dimensional [representation] and I want to go further by using my language in digital media'.

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