Artwork title : Digital Peking Opera Mask

Peking Opera is a special traditional Chinese stage art, and the mask is the medium through which actors’ emotions are expressed. Now, away from home for 9 years and based in the U.S, I feel both a defamiliarization from and a renewed obsession with Peking Opera masks. They are objects of the beautiful bizarre. The project uses AI-assisted masks and realizes them in 3D digital models.

Once a native to Beijing, now, I am part of the Asian diaspora and Chinese diaspora. After I became a nomad, living in places that don’t have my roots, I feel an increasingly strong inner call for masks, because they are personas. In traditional Chinese opera genres, there are always multiple archetypes of personas which are exaggerated and very expressive in both mask and movement. In Peking Opera, there are typically four personas – sheng, dan, jing, and chou. Sheng is a male character, in which there are subtypes such as lao sheng (the old man), xiao sheng (the young man), and wu sheng (the male warrior); dan is a female character, in which there are subtypes like lao dan (the crone), qing yi (the beautiful young heroine), hua dan (qing yi’s maid), and dao ma dan (the female warrior); jing is a character with boldly painted face, who needs to be a forceful character with a robust, strong voice; chou is the clown character, with a comically ugly painted face. I am attracted to the personas and the opera masks, and wish to digitally generate unprecedented masks for a digital avatar collection.

This collection is intended to be exhibited and minted as NFT series. For each NFT collector of a mask, a physical print of the work is sent.