I was surprised by both the quantity and the quality when Hailan showed me the canvas works she has produced in the past year and a half. I also felt it is most natural for Hailan to have found her identity as an artist, an identity that had been hidden under her professional look in the business world. It is commendable for Hailan to put her true passion and dream into concrete, well executed actions.

 

From her early series of works Lost in Words to the most recent Pixel Vision, Hailan has demonstrated her capacity of developing a unique artistic language in a short period of time. The artist’s language is not only highly sophisticated and recognizable, but also matches her own personal style as a young, fashionable woman. In contrast to the clean, saturated color tones that serve as the background for her works, the images she has selected to portray reflect a wide range of contents, often with ambiguous form. Most importantly, she has found her own expression of the world around her, using a plurality of dots, or pixels, as the key elements in her works.

 

Pixels are the building blocks for all digital images; the more pixels, the more detailed images are presented. Digital images are changing the way we observe and understand the world around us today with a trend toward higher and higher resolutions. Almost all of the images we see nowadays are aimed at approximating reality to its ultimate extreme. Google’s revolutionary technology RAISR (Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution) is able to transform low quality images to high resolution pictures. Compared to low resolution images, high definition images express a closer approximation of reality with far greater details and subtle changes in color. Working in the other direction, by reducing the number of dots, excessive and irrelevant information and details are filtered out. This reversion might serve well as a tool against the era of information overabundance.

 

Hailan’s latest works adopt the use of pixels - what one might call basic building blocks of the digital generation - as the personal signature in Pixel Vision. By transforming real life pictures to lower definition analogue, monochromatic images on canvas, she strips the images of vast amounts of information contained in reality to simpler forms. The information removed by the artist requires individual viewers to piece together the work. 

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About author 

Wang Jing

Founding Editor in Chief, Orient Masters, Today Art Museum

Executive publisher and Chief Editor, Independent magazine Scope

Chief Editor, Official website of CAFA Art Museum