JULIUS BAER
NEXT GENERATION ART PRIZE
View the new artworks by the Prize Winners
The Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize virtual showcase unveils the new artworks of the six prize winners of the bank’s digital art prize for young artists in Asia.
The virtual showcase offers a detailed view of each artwork in an interactive environment, set against a captivating meta-world of a futuristic floating city in Asia. You will also learn about the artists and how the next generation themes of Future Cities, Digital Disruption and Sustainability have inspired their captivating digital art creations.
Experience the Virtual Showcase
Experience the future of art in the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize virtual showcase.
Immerse yourself in the cutting-edge, new digital artworks created by the six Prize Winners of the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize. Walk around the virtual showcase and explore each artwork up close, learn about the artists and their creative concepts in this interactive desktop experience.
To find out more about the Art Prize, the six Prize Winners, or to preview the highlights of their artworks, click here.
Download the virtual showcase that features the new digital artworks created by the Prize Winners for an immersive experience.
Get started now on Windows devices and stay tuned for the upcoming MacOS release.
Instructions
- Download the zip file.
- Extract the contents of the zip file.
- Double-click on the file to open and run the virtual showcase.
- Once the virtual exhibition is launched, look for navigation instructions displayed on-screen to navigate around the virtual showcase.” to “Once the virtual exhibition is launched, look for navigation instructions displayed on-screen to explore the virtual showcase.
- Click on the "Settings" or "Options" button to access the performance adjustment menu.
- If you face any trouble downloading the experience, watch this video.
Please note that the following specifications are the minimum requirements for running the downloadable experience. For a smoother and more immersive experience, we recommend meeting or exceeding these specifications.
About the Artworks
Explore the ideas introduced by the winning artists in response to the themes of the Prize. Learn more about how these concepts were transformed into digital artworks during the Art and Technology Accelerator Programme of the Prize.
‘Future Retro Future’ re-envisions a new retro future as it draws upon nostalgia and offers a counterbalance to technological overload, while promoting sustainability, cultural heritage, and enabling alternative visions of the future. It allows us to reflect on the past, engage with the present, and shape a more thoughtful and inclusive future.
My art will focus on stylised scenes of this reimagined future and explore what life could be or look like in these alternative realities, hoping to inspire our path forward.
André Wee (Singapore)
Artwork: Future Retro Future
Theme: Future Cities
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Andre Wee 黄永强 (b. 1989) is an innovative artist and illustrator whose work spans the digital and physical realms. He blends cutting-edge technology with art to create immersive and engaging works that delight and surprise his viewers. Through creative storytelling and striking imagery, André invites his audience on a journey that blurs the lines between the real and the virtual.
André honed his craft at the Rhode Island School of Design in the USA, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. He now runs his own company, Studio André Wee (SAW), based in Singapore, and has worked with high-profile clients such as Apple, Google, Meta and the New York Times.
Carla Chan (Hong Kong)
Artwork: Traces of Space Beyond
Theme: Sustainability
As the plane gracefully glided across the sky, leaving behind a trail of artificial clouds, my heart swelled with a bittersweet mix of awe and sorrow.
Nature itself serves as a profound inspiration to me, with its captivating beauty and the intricate ways with humans. The symbolism of artificial nature underscores our ephemeral existence on Earth and the profound impact we have upon it.
‘Traces of Space Beyond’ is an ever-evolving visual journey, propelled in real-time by Zurich's weather, population, and flight data. It manifests as an artwork composed of an ever-changing sky, reminiscent of a spatial expanse adorned with a trail of artificial clouds. It portrays the interconnectedness of earthly events and human influence, calling for careful observation and balance between progress and sustainability. Within this immersive experience, it creates a contemplative space that intertwines our world, reminding us of the delicate equilibrium that exists between life and nature.
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Carla Chan (b. 1989) lives and works in Berlin and Hong Kong. Born during the digital transition period, Carla is influenced by computational thinking in her artistic practice. She invents different methods of capturing and recomposing images, videos, interactive media, augmented reality, and installations.
Minimal in style, Chan’s works blend physical and digital elements into a hybrid form of materiality, blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, figure and abstraction. Fusing the poetics in both nature and digital technologies, her work creates a virtual space for contemplation and often plays with the ambiguity between forms of nature and the digital realm.
Chan Wan Kyn (Singapore)
Artwork: City in Aether
Theme: Future Cities
Future cities will have a fast-paced nature and be in constant flux. They are not merely physical spaces, but also reflections of collective cultures and values. Amidst the unprecedented expansion of cities, we often overlook the need to pause, observe, and reflect on the perpetual changes occurring within them.
‘City in Aether’ delves into the significance of these symbolic representations of culture and values. It emphasises the necessity to take a moment to appreciate and contemplate these ongoing transformations, stressing that the development of cities is a collective effort influenced by factors such as feedback and data collection. This artwork embodies an ever-growing cityscape, forever evolving, chaotic, uncertain and derived from personal and communal data. Its purpose is to stimulate contemplation regarding the role of technology and urban planning in shaping the cities of tomorrow. By challenging existing perceptions, ‘City in Aether’ aims to ignite conversations about the immense possibilities of collaborative co-creation.
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Chan Wan Kyn (b. 1994) is a visual artist and engineer from Singapore. He draws inspiration from the intangible elements of his surroundings, such as negative space, light, and human connection, as well as from exploring familiar and unfamiliar environments. Expressing his concepts through a variety of mediums, multidisciplinary practices, and methodologies, his works manifest themselves in myriad ways, from sculptural forms and immersive installations to digitally curated and generated works. With each iteration, he allows his pieces to evolve over time, exploring different methods and processes to propose new paradigms and perspectives that may inspire a greater sensitivity to the literal and figurative surroundings of his audience.
Jamela Law (Hong Kong, Singapore)
Artwork: Scars, Skins and Styles: Metamorphosis in the Metaverse
Theme: Digital Disruption
‘Scars, Skins and Styles: Metamorphosis in the Metaverse’ celebrates underrepresented individuals who have emerged from traumatic experiences. It aims to foster dialogue among artists, participants, and observing audiences on pressing issues of mental health by using digital technologies and fashion co-designing as tools for art mediation, which is a growing practice involving communities to promote empathy and healing. Through the sharing of human experiences and utilising the magic of creativity, the artist hopes to create a warm hearted, celebratory space that closes the distance amongst us, one metamorphosis at a time.
By deconstructing these walls of isolation, foundations can be rebuilt to help participants connect and understand their inner power. To accomplish this, the artist proposes to harness the power of Enclothed Cognition to manifest a radical, open, and optimistic future. Digital Fashion will be the medium used to facilitate our creative process, which involves emotional co-designing by mixing humanism, spiritualism and science and technology.
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Jamela Law (b. 1992) is a neurodiverse artist based in Hong Kong and Singapore. She holds a BA(Hons) accredited by Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. Jamela’s works often revolve around themes of culture, social justice and environment. As an outsider in a myriad of ways, she hopes to redefine social constructs and cultivate empathy in her adopted communities.
In 2021, she was awarded the Inkluvision Human Rights Arts Prize by the Justice Centre and Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, as well as the top prize at the Sexual Health Matters show organised by Pulse Gallery in Bangkok, where 50% of the proceeds of artwork sale was donated to support the testing and treatment of STDs for disadvantaged populations in Southeast Asia.
‘Algorithm Actually’ is a digital artwork that uses an individual’s dating app data to generate a 3D motion dynamic artwork, visualising expressions of human connections. Using data from an individual that met their partner on a dating app, the most commonly used words adopted by the couple during their conversation were analysed, then used to generate the artwork.
The work explores the role of language, in order to find emotional reciprocity during the search for a partner. The soft body words are first generated – signifying the initial conversation. Next, the individual letters rise up and intermingle, expressing the energy of motion in dialogue and excitement. Individual letters merge and connect with each other in a form of wordplay, implying a sense of fun and emotional intimacy. As time passes, the letters form an entirely new configuration. The conversation between two people have transformed abstract words into a uniquely co-created entity of meaning and significance – the rare human spark of finding meaning and connection with another person within our digital landscape.
Natalie Yen Ye Wong (Hong Kong)
Artwork: Algorithm Actually
Theme: Digital Disruption
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Natalie Wong (b. 1987) is a mixed-media artist whose creative practice is divided between her own fine art works and commercial client projects. The artist currently divides her time between Hong Kong and London.
Working across a diverse range of mediums including digital art, textiles, LEDs, recycled plastic, paper and interactive mediums – Wong has collaborated with global brands including: Coca-Cola, Nike, adidas, Victoria’s Secret, KFC and Astrazeneca. In 2021, Wong partnered with The South China Morning Post to create a series of 2D animations by combining traditional hand-drawn elements with motion graphics for charity. In this series, Wong playfully re-interpreted traditional Chinese ceramics and used digital animation to make seemingly still patterns come alive with motion.
Viraag Desai (India)
Artwork: Pathfinder
Theme: Digital Disruption
‘Pathfinder’ is a digital re-envisioning of the traditional relief with a focus on the craftsperson. A constantly changing narrative told in intricate geometry, exploring the contrasts between man and nature, prehistory and the Anthropocene. The project draws from the history of sculpture and tells stories of society and its evolution through ‘making’, with interactive multiple choice elements that encourage repeat viewing. Each choice focuses on a particular material and takes the viewer through the process of fabrication to civilisation in each section. The scenes have been sculpted in VR using voxel tools and generative geometry and are inspired by muralists and craftspeople of the past.
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Viraag Desai (b. 1986) works from his studio in his hometown of Kolkata, West Bengal. After completing a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he has exhibited widely in the USA and India. Desai has participated in artist residencies throughout India, Spain and Bangladesh, such as the Piramal residency, Linea de Costa and Uronto. He has worked as Art Director in stage and film, and painted murals for the Byculla Wall Project with Piramal Art Foundation and Burhani College in Mumbai. He has completed several large-scale commissions for commercial spaces, both in India and abroad, expanding his practice from painting to sculpture to technology-based installations, such as ‘Emissions’ at Serendipity Arts Festival, and India Story.
About the Art & Technology Accelerator Programme
The winners of the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize embarked on a 3-month Art and Technology Accelerator Programme that featured a variety of workshops led by industry experts and mentors. These workshops covered a range of topics, such as augmented reality, contemporary art and design, effective self-promotion for artists in today's landscape of the art industry, managing the artist’s audiences and collaborators, leveraging art technology for social good, and exploring the role of artificial intelligence in the digital art world.
The workshops helped to equip artists with the tools and knowledge they need to develop their careers and explore new avenues for expression and exchange.