Faculty Show

Lien Fan Shen, Assistant Professor - Division of Film Studies

I believe that contemporary animation production becomes a way of knowing, not only toward what we don't know, but also toward what limits our way to know. In the following two animated works, I have attempted to present the ambiguous states between contemporary visual simulations and the physical world.

“Thaw,” collaborated with Satu Hummsti, is a digital performance that combines dance choreography with animated images. This work uses projected animated images to function as stage lights, through which the movement of dancers, physical lightings, and animated images on the stage mingle with each other. This work presents the art of movement in any possible form. The animated images extend the bodily movements of the dancers and enable viewers to explore various psychological states and to challenge the limits of physical states. This work directs its viewers to a complex rereading of these states and to a rethinking of our bodies.

The Buddha simulates traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy through technologies of 3D computer animation. Inspired by the simplicity and directness of Chinese ink painting, this work nostalgically preserves hand-drawings quality, purposefully deceiving the viewers' sense of "space" through visual flatness. The Buddha features a kind of handmade, nostalgic, and depth less aesthetic by utilizing computer technologies to construct three-dimensional cinematic depth of field, lights and shadows, camera movements, and charters' motions. It gives spectators an illusion of the handmade animation by its flattened appearance, whereas motions, including camera movements with the coordinated lights and shadows, the perspective alignments, and dynamic effects imply a three-dimensional virtual space. Juxtaposing a flattened surface with the simulation of a three-dimensional space, it possesses a subtly unfamiliar state between 2D and 3D virtual spaces, manifesting an illusion of an illusion.