Brain Garden - The 5th Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival 2023 & CAA Graduation Season Kicks Off

Let the Flowers of Youth Bloom

Let the Artistic Creativity Flow

HANGZHOU, China, June 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Brain Garden – The 5^th Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival 2023 & CAA Graduation Season kicked off online and offline on June 1. This edition of Youth Art Festival is co-hosted by Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, Publicity Department of the CPC Hangzhou Municipal Committee, China Academy of Art (CAA), and Zhejiang Conservatory of Music under the guidance of the Publicity Department of CPC Zhejiang Provincial Committee and Hangzhou Municipal People's Government. The festival features a wide variety of online and offline artistic shows and activities centered on the future and the youth. It is a grand city-wide artistic feast in Hangzhou.

The Youth Art Festival is presented online on CAACOSMOS and West Lake Sky Screen and offline at six venues, namely Zhejiang Exhibition Hall, West Lake Art Museum, Zhejiang Art Museum, World Tourism Museum (1368 Xiangxi Road), Quan Shanshi Art Center, and Yichuang Town, with a total exhibition area of nearly 70,000 square meters. Over 3,000 works from more than 2,500 Class of 2023 graduates (including 1,766 undergraduates, 688 masters, and 97 doctors) are showcased. Over 2,000 young artists, designers, writers, and scholars have gathered online for this youthful art event.

This is a city-wide cross-sectoral youthful creative event as well as a program of public art education for all.

A Self-iterated Youth Art Festival, Inspiring the Young Generation with Art

CAA Graduation Season is dynamic.

CAA was the first to hold a Graduation Season open to all Hangzhou citizens in 2010 and upgraded it to Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival in 2019, a festival celebrated across the whole city. The Youth Art Festival allows the graduation season to be enjoyed by all outside the campus, inspires the public with art, integrates the school into the city's development, and shares learning and teaching results with the public, showing CAA as an "Unwalled Academy". This is exactly the original aspiration or vision of CAA.

Themed Veni, Vidi, We Young, the inaugural Youth Art Festival took place in 2019, presenting young people's interactive worldview as well as their wish to interview the world. The Second Youth Art Festival in 2020, themed Being with You in the World, provoked a rethinking of human lifestyles amidst the pandemic. The Third Youth Art Festival in 2021, themed Prestory, was a rethinking of Being with You in the World. The festival presented a serious dilemma – "everything is interconnected; all beings are alone." We got lost and trapped in a health crisis and were facing new issues and challenges of bioethics in the digital age. With the theme of Vital Force, the fourth edition of the Youth Art Festival in 2022 called on young artists and designers to devote themselves entirely to life in the present, and champion the positivity, tenacity, openness and sensibility of life with artistic creativity and goodness, generating a force to lead a "positive life".

The theme of the new edition of Youth Art Festival is Brain Garden. The garden represents an age of innocence envisioned by humans. On all lands of dreams, be it the Garden of Eden, the Arcadia, Utopia, or Marco Polo's "Xanadu" of Kublai Khan, flowers bloom everywhere, everything goes well, there are neither conflicts nor sufferings, all things live in harmony and people are free and happy. An educational institution is certainly a garden. Learning in an art academy is not an experience of carefree roaming in a garden, but a journey of working with nature and growing with beauty.

In an era where human brains and machine brains simulate each other, and human intelligence competes with artificial intelligence, art has become a "brain garden": pathways diverge, and complexities intertwine, with infinite computing power and boundless creativity... In the post-pandemic era, amidst the turbulence of excessive generation of AIGC, we call on everyone to nurture their own "brain garden" and summon forth the arrival of spring. Let the flowers of youth bloom and let the artistic creativity flow. Every edition of the Youth Art Festival showcases the works of young CAA artists in the city with the expectations of basing artistic creations in reality and comprehending humanity for society's sake.

A Mixed Reality Show Linking the Virtual and Real Worlds

The opening ceremony of Brain Garden – The 5^th Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival 2023 began at 19:28 on June 1 at Wulin Square, Hangzhou. In 2023, ChatGPT swept the human world and AI set off a new technology revolution.

As the brain-computer interface technology advances, the boundary between the virtual and real worlds is getting blurred. The opening ceremony started with an AIGC video entitled Oddinary, indicating that humans have stood at a crossroads in a new era of intelligent civilization. At the MR opening ceremony, AI Garden led people into an exploration of a future created amidst the intertwining of human beings and technology in the era of AI, enabling the pursuit of dreams and ideals without constraints. Reading the Topology of Dreams in the midst of reality and virtuality, people explore the virtual world built by humans as true Creators. Audiences have the chance to enjoy the fashion show with hyper-audiovisual scenes at the Metaverse Art Academy (MAA). At the opening ceremony, the guests put on a brainwave device to start Lian Xiang – one of the artworks for the show. When the signal is re-encoded by AI technology, a garden gradually appears in the human brain, turning it into a theater for people to unleash creativity.

Over 80 works from 46 students in Fashion and Apparel Design at the School of Design, CAA are showcased in the fashion show. The designers created their works with an open mindset and expression ways from multiple dimensions, placing emphasis on frontier exploration results in art, philosophy, science and technology while paying attention to topics such as survival crisis, cultural alienation, social care, body language, emotional barriers, and future testing ground. The interaction between virtual and real worlds, exploration of experimental materials, creative knitting texture, and technologies such as 3D printing all have become paths leading designers in a great journey of exploration and design. The processes from identifying clues, making records, carrying out experiments, and making summaries to finally turning ideas into real works have demonstrated the designers' true inquiry into the real world and their imagination of the future world.

CAACOSMOS, an Art Community in the Metaverse

CAACOSMOS, an online art community of CAA, was debuted on April 8, 2023, as part of the academic events commemorating CAA's 95^th Anniversary & 2023 CAA Launch Day.

CAACOSMOS is an art community in the Metaverse and an innovative and interactive platform for global artists and designers. It integrates online exhibitions, information, courses, lectures, forums, workshops, livestreaming, digital asset right confirmation and AI tools to help people navigate a digital life, digital interaction, art creation, and value transformation.

A New Journey of Intermedia Creations and Innovative Design Based upon Tradition

Under the sub-theme of "Infinite Thoughts," the School of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy exhibits 303 works of 204 graduates (including undergraduates, postgraduates, and doctoral students) at the World Tourism Museum, including works of 131 graduates majoring in Chinese Figure Painting, Chinese Landscape Painting, Chinese Flowers and Birds Painting, and General Painting at the Department of Chinese Painting and 73 graduates majoring in Calligraphy & Seal Carving and Calligraphy and Education at the Department of Calligraphy. The School of Intermedia Art exhibits more than 200 works of 73 undergraduates and 34 postgraduates. Themed "World Giants", the graduation exhibition presents the profound changes in our relationship with the world and inspires young creators to expand their minds and meditate on their souls and the outer world. Composed of several sections including "The Silence of Currents", "Artificial Art Intelligence", "Across the River and into the Forest", "Creation Continent", "Motivation", and "Into the Sound", the show adopts diverse mediums such as live performances, video installations, power devices, miniatures, and monument installations, depicting diverse themes and presenting a great combination of intermedia art expressions. The School of Design exhibits 208 graduation works of 336 undergraduate students and 71 works of 71 postgraduate and doctoral students. The works from the Department of Visual Communication Design demonstrate the uniqueness and possibilities of graduates in exploring the interplay between tradition and innovation, the integration of humanities and technologies, the solution of social issues and the extension of art expression. The works from the Department of Dyeing, Weaving and Fashion Design are focused on areas of research such as sustainable material design, smart textile design, digital textile design, healing design and oriental design, presenting the designers' true inquiry into the real world and their imagination of the future world. The Department of Industrial Design has worked closely with businesses and co-built the "〇一 Workshop", depicting various future scenarios in respect of life aesthetics, digital interaction, intelligent manufacturing, and smart mobility. The School of Design & Innovation exhibits 192 graduation works. Under the sub-theme of "Cooperator", the designers provoke discussions on the cooperation between art and science, cooperation between AI and humans for co-creation, cooperation in biological evolution, cooperation in social design, as well as cooperation in culture, economy, and history. The school's five institutions, namely the Research Institute of Society & Strategy, Research Institute of Media & Interaction Design, Research Institute of Intelligence & Systematics, Research Institute of Enterprise & Prospect, Research Institute of Science & Creation, explore the human experience and complex systems of art and technology across various domains, showing diverse design practices as a prelude to future graduation exhibitions.

The School of Painting expresses its desire for the blossoming of new life after the three-year pandemic, through paintings on "New Life in the Garden". The School of Sculpture and Public Art channels its reflections on the transformation and evolution of the individual and society and its desire for exploring the unknown through "Nomadic Seeds". The School of Art Administration and Education responds to the idea of "Life Is Education" with "Vital Force 6.0: The Harvesting of Things Invisible" and unveils a path toward self-realization. The School of Arts and Humanities showcases its students' graduation theses in "Visual Paths" and represents textual research as images. The School of Crafts showcases a multi-faceted narrative on the research and learning practices of its young students in "Fire, Hands, Craft", in which it compares the lengthy cultivation of skills in materials, crafts and plastic arts to the repeated tempering of an Erudite Craftsman's character and mind. Wang Shu, the Dean of the School of Architecture believes that the most pertinent challenge of our times is the preservation of diversity. "Championing Diversity" thus forms the core of his school's academic ethos. The School of Film Art explores the contemporary development of poetic cinema through the perspective of youths. The School of Animation and Games aspires to reimagine a new form of perception that bridges the real and virtual worlds as it explores and creates new realities and ways of thinking by harnessing diversity and free play. The EDNA Joint Institute (NACAA) showcases designers' meditations and creations in differing Chinese and French cultural contexts in "Transborder Creation".

CAA's Youth Art Festival has helped to fully unlock the power of art and innovation, inspiring young people with art and facilitating efforts to make the city of Hangzhou, which blends tradition and modernity, a destination and spiritual home for young artists worldwide and a world cradle of cultural innovation in the post-pandemic era.

The Unwalled Academy has started a new journey from Hangzhou.