The centerpiece chosen for the China pavilion at the Shanghai Expo of 2010 was an animated version of the 12th-century painted scroll Along the River during the Qingming Festival. The animated painting is one of many recent adaptations of traditional brush painting to new media. Such works explore how digital technology enriches Chinese aesthetics and creates unique art forms. The emerging art genres incorporate practices from photography, cinema, sculpture, performance art, and architecture.

In this talk, Yomi Braester (scholar of visual culture and editor-in-chief of Journal of Chinese Cinemas) introduces developments in digital art in China over the past fifteen years. He shows how these artworks mesh with other technologies that mediate the digital environment, such as Artificial Intelligence and “smart city” algorithms.

Professor Braester’s research focuses on literary and visual practices, with emphasis on modern China and Taiwan—in architecture, advertisement, screen media, and stage arts. He is interested in how texts and images change our perception of space and history. Founding director of the UW Summer Program in Chinese Film History and Criticism at the Beijing Film Academy he has served as the president of the Association for Chinese and Comparative Literature. He’s also the recipient of the 2012 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, in the post-1900 Category, given by the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, for his new book Painting the City Red.