Parody of Jay’s Music: Twenty Years of Music, One Painted World A year-long collaboration with Jay Chou—and the beginning of Jacky Tsai’s journey into digital art.
06th Nov 2019
What might twenty years of music look like in a single painting? Parody of Jay’s Music (《翻玩范特西》, 2019) grew from an invitation from Jay Chou to Jacky Tsai: to create a panoramic world that would bring together the songs, stories and imagination of his musical career.
The conversation began around Tsai’s 2018 solo exhibition at Unit London. Chou imagined his own Along the River During the Qingming Festival: a densely populated picture that could be explored slowly, with new encounters waiting in every corner. For Tsai, whose Pop Art moves between Chinese visual traditions and contemporary popular culture, it opened the possibility of translating a musical universe into paint.
Parody of Jay’s Music, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 250 × 800 cm. Complete work.
Twelve months, more than sixty songs
Over the next twelve months, artist and musician exchanged ideas, revisited Chou’s recordings and shaped the composition together. They selected more than sixty songs, choosing references that could become figures, gestures, buildings and unexpected meetings within the painting. The canvas expanded as the ideas multiplied.
The painting in progress in the studio.
Tsai listened repeatedly to the music and watched Chou’s films, looking for ways to give remembered sounds a visual life. The result is a world of hidden song references and playful crossings between eras. A viewer can follow the broad sweep of the scene, then return to a small detail and discover an entirely different story.
A detail from the painting’s world of music, fantasy and visual clues.Figures and gestures offer further routes into the songs behind the image.
The work also contains Tsai’s first appearance as “General Tsai”: a small cameo that places the artist inside the world he has made. Across the painting, such personal touches sit alongside shared cultural memories. Its title, Parody of Jay’s Music, reflects this spirit of playful reinterpretation, inviting audiences to look, recognise and make connections for themselves.
When the painting began to move
The painting was completed on 6 November 2019. Finishing the canvas did not bring the project to an end. Tsai felt there were still ideas and stories that a static image could not fully express. He developed a digital artwork from the painting, allowing its visual world to unfold through movement and time. This became the starting point of his digital art practice.
Parody of Jay’s Music — the digital artwork.
A later augmented-reality experience introduced another way to encounter the original painting. Through a smartphone, visitors could see elements of the image come to life, moving between the physical canvas and its animated world. The experience opened a further route into the stories and song references embedded in the work.
The painting activated through augmented reality.
A painting to be shared
After the work was completed, Chou encouraged Tsai to bring it into museums so that more fans could experience it in person. They shared the hope that the painting would become a place of discovery: somewhere visitors could spend time, find a familiar song and begin to decipher its visual codes.
A closer encounter with the painting’s densely layered musical world.
At its heart, Parody of Jay’s Music is both a celebration of twenty years of music and an invitation to keep looking. For Tsai, the year-long collaboration also opened a new chapter, carrying his painting into animation, digital storytelling and audience interaction.
Original painting by Jacky Tsai, commissioned by Jay Chou. AR experiences developed in collaboration with ZHEN. AR animation by Future Power Station. Studio photographs courtesy of Jacky Tsai Studio.
