The Center for the Arts at Monmouth University has announced an October 9, 2017 artist talk with renowned artist Weili Shi hosted in the Wilson Hall Auditorium as the first fall event of the University’s ArtNow: Performance, Art, & Technology series.
The 6 p.m. event will give the innovative creator and technologist the floor as he speaks about his one-of-a-kind project, Shan Shui in the World . Shi has taken the artistic realm by storm with his transformative work, which takes the mathematics behind New York City’s most iconic buildings and turns them into beautiful Chinese shanshui (landscape) paintings. As Shi explains, the project builds a bridge between “urban life and people’s yearning for the nature, and between social responsibility and spiritual purity.”
Shi designs through the media of digital technologies. He entered the scene by merging his background in computer science with his passion for painting, dance, and Zen. As a designer, he succeeds in marrying the power of technology with the free, humanistic spirit in his work. Where some may consider it a challenge to mesh the two fields, Shi brings science and art together in a way that seems effortless. In one of his projects, Shi created a music generating system that improvises based on a human dancer’s real-time movements. In another, he constructed a Zen garden where nearly every detail within it changes constantly. The project challenges its audience to “grasp, embrace, and enjoy the present moment.”
Shi’s selected projects include all of his aforementioned works: Shan Shui in the World (2016) , Impermanent Zen Garden (2016), and The Humanistic Movement (2014). Additional selected works are a Kinect Dynamic system called Little Universe (2015), in which poetic objects interact with each other and the audience; and a project called Oculi: A Show of Alternative Spaces (2015), which focuses on poetic alternative spaces, super-imposed on the physical space of a living environment.
Shi holds a Master’s of Engineering Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. Shi works as a developer at Bluecadet, a website design company based in Philadelphia, and teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York.
This event is part of the Center for the Arts’ ArtNow: Performance, Art, & Technology series at Monmouth University. ArtNow is a visiting artist series that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and embraces provocative works that challenge what we know, and what we think we know. The event is free and open to the public. Additional information about Artist Talk with Weili Shi can be found at www.monmouth.edu/mca.
