Inspired by a new style she found captured in animation and comics, former MoCA creative director Victoria Lu coined the term ‘animamix.’ A decade after that moment, MoCA Shanghai is among five galleries hosting the fifth edition of Animamix Biennale.
Featuring 80 percent site-specific works, Animamix brings together 13 artists from around the globe, spanning a variety of mediums like sculpture, installations, VR gaming and short film.
The museum’s third floor has been transformed into a studio for families and kids to learn how animation is created.
“Our museum gets a lot of families,” curator Wang Weiwei says. “We want to give children an easy access into the art world by allowing them to play.”
Award-winning animator Trevor Lai has created the Imagination to Animation project that lays out the ways his studio uses technology to create 3D animations of his famed characters like BOOMi, Bibop and Piggy. Visitors are able to download his BOOMi app, which allows users to add a 3D animated character to their personal pictures or videos within seconds.
Hong Kong- based Bananafish Books’s Color of Imagination project puts children in the role of color designers. A wall is filled with black and white pictures that are collectively screened on an on-site TV - moving frame by frame on each photo of the wall.
Kids are encouraged to take one of the pictures and color them in as they desire. They can then submit their work into a scanner attached on the wall, which is automatically sent to the TV as part of the animated short.
Creators of art and design books for kids, Bananafish believes “through coloring the black and white story lines, we expect a wider instinctive understanding of story and color design.”
While Wang explains the rest of the Animamix Biennale is dedicated to showcasing “the spirit of what these forms can give people,” there are plenty of works that will appeal to all members of the family.
The exhibition opens with Park Junghyun’s ‘Disturbing,’ a striking piece created from string that visitors are encouraged to touch and interact with. Raymond Zhou’s ‘Lo-Fi King’ features a playable vintage arcade system loaded with 100 games and space for people to ride around on toy scooters.
“Animation has infiltrated people’s lives by bridging the gap between reality and fiction,” Wang says. “An artist friend was telling me about how her five-year-old daughter’s idea of a mouse was Mickey Mouse. The young generation of kids had never seen a real mouse because city life is so modern.”
Until July 17, 10am-6pm, RMB50, MOcA.
