A Decade in Motion — Jacky Tsai, Digital Artist of the Year
Digital Art Fair Xperience Hong Kong 2022 — an immersive retrospective and a Sotheby’s milestone.
03rd Nov 2022
Named Digital Artist of the Year at Digital Art Fair Xperience Hong Kong 2022, Jacky Tsai brought a decade of his practice into a new dimension. Across an immersive room, programmable digital works and physical objects, his presentation connected the craft traditions of painting and carving with moving images, live data and holographic form.
The fair’s second edition took place at Asia Standard Tower in Central, with public exhibition dates of 22 October–6 November 2022. For Tsai, it offered a setting in which digital art could be encountered at the scale of an exhibition: as a space to enter, an image that changes, or an object with both a physical and a digital life.
Ten years, one immersive world
Jacky Tsai’s Golden Years was the artist’s first immersive room, bringing together imagery developed over ten years. The journey included Hong Kong Neon Star, created for this Hong Kong presentation; Parody of Jay’s Music, commissioned by Jay Chou in 2019; and imagery from Floral Dragon, Hyperreal Embrace and Shanghai Tang Cafe. Familiar compositions unfolded around the viewer, turning ten years of work into a moving environment.
Co-produced with Hong Kong Film Award-winning visual effects director Victor Wong, the project gave Tsai’s dialogue between Eastern and Western imagery a spatial and cinematic form. With soundtrack support from Jay Chou and Ryuichi Sakamoto, it expressed his ambition for an internationally engaged Chinese digital art shaped by its own cultural references, visual language and ways of thinking.
From the handmade to the programmable
The six works selected for Sotheby’s Xperience Digital Art Auction reflected the breadth of this presentation. Alongside Golden Years, they moved between carved objects, painting, holograms and digital compositions whose appearance could change beyond the artist’s studio.
Four Horses — Past Present and Future
Tsai reimagined his composition Four Horses in three forms: traditional wood carving, acrylic on canvas and a digital animation issued as an NFT. They stand for past, present and future. Displayed together, they ask how inherited craftsmanship, contemporary painting and digital art can interact and enrich one another, rather than replace one another.
Athena and Buddha
Created with NXG Labs, Athena and Buddha places Guanyin within Athena and Athena within Guanyin. Each figure contains the other: an image of interdependence and coexistence, rather than an opposition between East and West.
The figures alternate in real time according to the Hong Kong dollar–euro exchange rate. Presented in holographic form, their apparently incomplete bodies also suggest repair and a different kind of beauty. Within an unstable environment, the work offers a moment of recognition and reassurance.
Bitcoin — Buddha, Venus and Guan Yu
In Bitcoin — Buddha, Venus and Guan Yu, three figures are concealed within traditional Chinese pictorial imagery through a play of hidden forms that draws on Dalí’s visual language. The work asks how a Chinese painting tradition can find renewed expression in an international contemporary setting.
The image changes in real time with Bitcoin’s market value. Guan Yu embodies rising energy and martial courage; Venus represents calm and balance; the Buddhist figure evokes impermanence and spiritual refuge when fortunes fall. The market’s fluctuations become a reflection on life’s own changes, inviting viewers to find an image that speaks to their present circumstances.
Feng Shui Nine Dragons
Feng Shui Nine Dragons presents nine floral dragons through a digital work that changes with daily feng shui and the Chinese calendar. Their different associations include prosperity, protection, harmony and good fortune, translating a traditional Chinese understanding of change into a programmable image.
Shown with lacquer carving with gold leaf and nine metallic prints, the work connects code to craft. Its wishes for the wellbeing of family and home offer a human point of entry into the systems that govern the changing image.
MetaSkull
For Tsai, the skull is an individual structure that everyone carries beneath the skin, an image to recognise rather than fear. After three years of development with his creative team, MetaSkull carried his floral skull from traditional media into a virtual world.
Developed with Froyo Games, the generative collection was conceived as 1,001 unique digital assets. Its first NFT entered the Sotheby’s auction. Behind the project lay a vision of individuality and renewal: a distinctive skull through which a collector might imagine another life in a future virtual environment.
A walkthrough with the artist
Join Jacky Tsai for a tour of his presentation at Digital Art Fair Xperience Hong Kong 2022.
A Sotheby’s milestone
Reported combined auction result · Five lots sold
Sotheby’s partnered with Digital Art Fair for the Xperience Digital Art Auction, held online from 20 October to 1 November 2022. Five of Tsai’s lots achieved a reported combined result of HK$5,226,480, including Jacky Tsai’s Golden Years at HK$2,520,000.
The selection placed his physical and digital practice within the same auction context, marking an important moment in the development of this part of his work.
Behind the film
Filmed in Hong Kong, the accompanying artist portrait moved between conversation and locations across the city. A small selection of production photographs offers a glimpse of how the film was made.
On location and filming the artist interview in Hong Kong.
Digital Art Fair Xperience 2022 brought these different strands together in one presentation: the artist’s retrospective, the evolution of individual works, and the possibility of images that continue to move and change.