BMW announces collaboration with Acute Art to realize a project with BMW Art Journey awardee Lu Yang. Lu Yang presents latest artworks in Art Basel's “OVR: Miami Beach”.

Munich/London/Miami Beach. In cooperation with Acute Art and as long-term global partner of Art Basel, BMW will showcase the latest artworks of Lu Yang, BMW Art Journey awardee of 2019. The Shanghai-based artist is represented by Société, Berlin. From December 2 to 6, 2020, Art Basel will present “OVR: Miami Beach”, the latest edition of the show’s Online Viewing Rooms. The digital platform will feature galleries accepted to the 2020 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach and will be accompanied by a program of online events, including talks and gallery walk-throughs.

In collaboration with Acute Art, leading producer of visionary virtual and augmented reality (AR) artworks, and Lu Yang, BMW will present a new AR work where “DOKU”, the artist’s digital avatar, takes over the physical world in the form of a giant dancing superhero. The installation, titled “Gigant DOKU”, is developed by a game engine and incorporates motion capture image data from Tokyo and Bali gathered during the artist’s BMW Art Journey. The Augmented Reality Experience is available on Acute Art App. Please find the instructions for the app at the end of this text.

„For me as an artist who has been working on digital art projects for many years now, it is a great honor to gain the possibility of working with Acute Art. They are the leading producer of visionary AR artworks and have been working with so many successful artists in the field of AR before. During my BMW Art Journey, I had the chance to cooperate with different artists from several backgrounds and to deepen my research in motion capture technologies – knowledge and material that I can now use for my artworks. Even though I had to pause my travels due to the coronavirus, I am thankful that I am now able to proceed digitally, with the full support and creative freedom provided by the BMW Group,” says Lu Yang.

“We are so excited to work with Lu Yang, one of China’s most prominent young artists, who explores new immersive media to create poetic works that bridge the disciplines. The BMW Art Journey ‘Human Machine Reverse Motion Capture Project’ demonstrates his keen interest in the anthropology of dance into the virtual sphere employing cutting-edge motion-capture technology and robotics. Due to the global pandemic, his physical voyage to Indonesia, India, and Japan had to be adjusted but through a collaboration with Acute Art his dancing avatars can travel across the world digitally. AR makes interactive versions of his dancing figures possible, the first of which will be launched on the Acute Art app in conjunction with ‘OVR: Miami Beach’. Anyone who has downloaded the free app can interact with this dematerialized dancer and place him anywhere, film him and share his performance with friends globally. For an artist concerned with how the human body can overcome its physical limitations, this AR project represents an important step into the era of virtual art and curation,” says Daniel Birnbaum, Artistic Director, Acute Art.

The hard-edged, kinetic animations and paintings of Lu Yang (b. 1984) deploy the latest digital tools to fuse Chinese cultural and spiritual influences with distinctive imagery inspired by manga comics, contemporary youth and gaming subcultures. Trained at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and continuing to undertake studies in robotics, the artist is equally at home with traditional dance and performance practices as with futuristic notions about an emerging post-gender and post-human society in which the lines between the objective and metaphysical world are completely blurred. His distinctive body of work is an example of strikingly new visions emerging from a young generation of artists in today’s technologically advanced China.

Lu Yang’s BMW Art Journey entitled “Human Machine Reverse Motion Capture Projec" examines how the human body can be trained to overcome its physical limitations and explores its deployment in historical and present-day cultures. His research looks into how humans negotiate their evolving relationship with machines that may ultimately surpass human limitations. During his trip to Bali, Indonesia, in January 2020, Lu Yang employed sophisticated motion-capture devices to record dancer’s gestures, including facial, finger- and eye-capture techniques. These latest technological devices collected and analyzed the subtlest body movements and can mimic them using robotic technologies.

All works on view in “OVR: Miami Beach” relate to and are inspired by Lu Yang’s BMW Art Journey, which has continued in the digital realm after the novel coronavirus made it difficult to visit some of the originally planned destinations. More broadly, the selected works highlight the artist’s creative evolution in recent years, leading up to a current body of work in which Lu Yang’s digital avatar has become the subject of his continuing digital journey. Together, the works transport viewers into a fictional universe like no other, in which centuries-old philosophical concerns about what it means to be human are investigated in a hypnotic, cohesive and often disquieting visual language.

All digital artworks of Lu Yang will be accessible for VIPs and public in “OVR: Miami Beach” from December 2, 10am ET, to December 6, midnight ET, via the following link: https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17306

To fully discover and experience the interactive artwork of Lu Yang “Gigant DOKU” (from December 2, 10am ET), the Acute Art app is available free of charge on the App Store or Google Play. To start the experience, please see the instructions below:

1. Scan the QR code (in the PDF attached) using your smartphone and download the Acute Art App via the App Store or Google Play.
2. Open the Acute Art app and select “Lu Yang”.
3. Select “Gigant DOKU” and then the “place” button.
4. Point your phone towards the floor and tap to place the work. Drag your finger across the screen to rotate it.

The Acute Art app uses cutting-edge technology that works best on high-end phones with the latest software. The devices supported are iPhone X or above, and Samsung Galaxy S8 or equivalent. The app requires a phone with a minimum of 4GB of memory and Apple iOS 11 or Android 8.0 Oreo (API 24) operating system.

For further information about the artist and his BMW Art Journey, please visit:
www.bmw-art-journey.com and @bmwgroupculture.

For further questions please contact:

BMW Group Cultural Engagement
Prof. Dr Thomas Girst
BMW Group Corporate and Intergovernmental Affairs
Head of Cultural Engagement
Telephone: +49 89 382 24753
www.press.bmwgroup.com
Email: presse@bmw.de

SUTTON on behalf of Acute Art
Daria Darmaniyan
SUTTON
Senior Account Manager
Telephone: +44 77 156 68402
Email: daria@suttoncomms.com

Art Basel
Sarah Norton
Senior Media Relations Manager, Art Basel
Telephone: +41 58 206 2706
Email: press@artbasel.com

About Lu Yang and the BMW Art Journey

Lu Yang (b. 1984) is a Shanghai-based multi-media artist, who graduated from the New Media Art Department of the China Academy of Art. Deeply immersed in the subcultures of anime, video games, and Science-Fiction, the output of his artistic practice spans 3D-animated films, video game installations, holograms, neon, VR and software manipulation, often with overt Japanese manga and anime references. His work was displayed in exhibitions at Kulturforum, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; M Woods, Beijing; Shanghai Biennale; and Athens Biennale.

Lu Yang was announced as BMW Art Journey awardee during Art Basel in Basel in 2019. The international jury of experts included: Claire Hsu, Director Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, Matthias Mühling, Director Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Philip Tinari, Director UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, Samson Young, artist and winner of the first BMW Art Journey.

Launched in 2015, the BMW Art Journey is a collaboration between Art Basel and BMW, created to recognize and support emerging artists worldwide.

About Acute Art

Acute Art is unique in the way it fosters close working relationships with the world’s leading artists, such as KAWS, Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Jeff Koons, in addition some of the most exciting emerging practitioners, by providing access to cutting-edge technologies. Acute Art’s highly skilled production team allows artists to translate their creative vision into digital mediums, including virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. The Acute Art app enables users to access and own digital artworks created in AR, that lets people see, interact and collect art in an entirely new way. It is the latest development in the art, technology, and commerce space. The Acute Art app is freely available to download here. Please visit www.acuteart.com.

About Art Basel

Founded in 1970 by gallerists from Basel, Art Basel today stages the world's premier art shows for Modern and contemporary art, sited in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong. Defined by its host city and region, each show is unique, which is reflected in its participating galleries, artworks presented, and the content of parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition. Art Basel’s engagement has expanded beyond art fairs through new digital platforms such as Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms and new initiatives such as The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report and The BMW Art Journey. For further information, please visit artbasel.com.

About BMW Group Cultural Engagement

For 50 years, the BMW Group has initiated and engaged in over 100 cultural cooperations worldwide. The company places the main focus of its long-term commitment on contemporary and modern art, classical music and jazz as well as architecture and design. In 1972, three large-scale paintings were created by the artist Gerhard Richter specifically for the foyer of the BMW Group’s Munich headquarters. Since then, artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Daniel Barenboim, Jonas Kaufmann and architect Zaha Hadid have co-operated with BMW. In 2016 and 2017, female artist Cao Fei from China and American John Baldessari created the next two vehicles for the BMW Art Car Collection. For years, the BMW Group and its partners have been initiating and establishing their own formats such as BMW Tate Live, BMW Welt Jazz Award, BMW Open Work, the BMW Art Journey and the "Opera for All" concerts in Berlin, Munich, Moscow and London. The company also partners with leading museums, art fairs and orchestras as well as jazz festivals and opera houses around the world. With BMW OPERA NEXT, the new partnership with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the opportunities presented by digitalisation are used to open up new ways of accessing the world of opera for young audiences. As part of its art programme “Muse”, Rolls-Royce partners for the initiative “The Dream Commission” with two internationally esteemed art institutions. Together with Fondation Beyeler and Serpentine Galleries, emerging and established artists are invited to submit a moving-image work that delivers an immersive sensory experience. The artists are nominated and chosen by renowned personalities of the art world like Daniel Birnbaum, Suhanya Raffel, and Theodora Vischer. The BMW Group takes absolute creative freedom in all its cultural activities for granted – as this initiative is as essential for producing groundbreaking artistic work as it is for major innovations in a successful business.