I’m excited to announce our upcoming art exhibition in Highland Park, Los Angeles, at Avenue 50 Studio! The exhibition, “The Serpent and the Dragonfly,” runs from June 7 to July 5, 2025. It features a selection of works developed during our years living and working in Singapore—some of which have been exhibited on monumental LED screens across China and at Ars Electronica’s Deep Space 8K theater in Austria.
In 2005, I relocated to Southeast Asia to help launch Nanyang Technological University, Singapore’s first art school. As a founding faculty member of the School of Art, Design and Media (ADM), I helped establish the country’s first university-based program dedicated to art, design, and media research. It was a transformative moment—building a new academic model where artists could teach, innovate, and produce new knowledge through creative research.
In 2008, I secured a National Research Foundation grant to establish an interactive media lab at NTU. Our project, “Cinematics and Narratives: Creating stories within real-time visual toolsets,” explored how digital films could adapt in real time to audience feedback. We developed an “active cinema” system—where elements like visual style, lighting, and camera movement shifted dynamically based on live viewer input, such as facial expressions or gestures. Though the narrative arc remained fixed, the visual atmosphere responded to the audience, creating a more personalized and immersive viewing experience.
In 2015, my partner, artist Ina Conradi, and I co-founded Media Art Nexus (MAN), a large-scale digital art platform at NTU. This 15×2 meter LED screen—installed in a central campus hub—was conceived as an open digital gallery where interactive and audio-responsive media art could thrive in public space. With support from NTU and its museum initiative, we officially launched the platform in 2018 to bring art into the flow of daily campus life.
I used TouchDesigner to create generative, real-time visuals for MAN, while Ina designed a pioneering course that empowered students to produce and exhibit their own media art on the wall. Together, we transformed the campus into a living gallery—a vibrant intersection of art, education, and technology.
Since its launch, our work at Media Art Nexus has reached audiences well beyond Singapore. Our immersive animation, “Quantum LOGOS (vision serpent),” premiered at Ars Electronica’s Deep Space 8K theater in Linz, Austria—an iconic venue for cutting-edge digital art. We’ve also presented our animations across giant LED façades in China. This includes a recent invitation to showcase on a 170-meter-wide outdoor screen in Hangzhou—the largest in Asia, viewed by up to a million people daily. Watching our work unfold across such monumental urban canvases has been surreal and deeply rewarding.
Now, for the first time, we’re bringing this body of work into a local, community-centered space. The Serpent and the Dragonfly at Avenue 50 Studio marks our debut in a neighborhood gallery setting. Instead of a university campus or high-tech festival venue, this exhibition offers an intimate and accessible environment. Visitors can engage directly with us and our adaptive animations and digital installations.
We’re genuinely excited (and yes, a little nervous!) to share this journey with the Los Angeles community. It’s an opportunity for us to reflect on how these projects—from Singaporean research labs to Austrian theaters and bustling Chinese city screens—can resonate on a personal, neighborhood level, fostering new conversations and connections right here at home.
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