Enter a fantasy world at a major festival of artworks which make use of new technology to blur the boundaries between artists and visitors and allow their imaginations to take flight. New media, a term often describing digital technologies, has been popular in the contemporary art field. It might be a sculpture with fancy lighting, a painting about the imagined Internet world or an installation piece involving interactive games.

Compared with traditional artworks, new media art is more interactive with visitors while more difficult to explain and categorize.

A modern city with a booming arts culture, Shanghai has been attractive for new media artists. The city has already held two eArts festival focusing on new media artworks. The third, with the theme "System Updating," will begin next Thursday, with three large exhibitions.

The festival is intended to provide a clearer and more understandable new media system model through the exhibitions, according to the organizers of the festival, who hope to "push the system to get updated for a sustainable development."

It aims to "reflect the existing problems of the system by analyzing the complicated knowledge, information, resource and circulation mechanism of the system."

In the past two festivals, dozens of artists gathered in Shanghai to display their work in all kinds of small events and exhibitions. This year, organizers have split the festival into three large exhibitions, each with a distinct theme and a lot of work from artists of different backgrounds, wishing to deliver the message in a clearer way.

"Fantastic Illusions - Media Art Exhibition of Chinese and Belgian Artists," one of the three exhibitions, is not only a communication platform for artists and visitors of the two countries, but also a project reflecting people's wish to enter a mysterious and fantastic world beyond their daily lives.

Artists always try their best to establish a unique world, a world that attracts many visitors who are unable to cross the border from their daily lives. And the exhibition discusses the various possibilities of interrupting the audiences' world or inviting them into the fantasy space created by artists.

The introduction of cyberspace in the late 20th century has made it easier for artists to cross the border of reality and the created fantasy space. Visitors can easily get into such spaces in virtual reality.

Fourteen artists -- seven Chinese and seven Belgians -- have established a fantasy space together for the exhibition using all kinds of media including video, painting and computer systems.

Shanghai artist Hu Jieming's work "Above Water, Under Water" is an interactive video installation on three screens. Screen A presents the scene of a man fishing by the window of a study near water. Screen B shows the exterior scene of a calm lake, with bridges, islands and residential buildings in the far background. And screen C shows the peaceful scene under the water.

As visitors get close to the screens, water gets poured into screen A until it fills the whole study room.

Meanwhile, all kinds of fish jump out of the water in screen B and divers enter screen C, either passing by or struggling under the water. When visitors step away from the screens, all scenes go back to the original status.

Belgian artist Nick Ervinck, inspired by Shanghai's Yuyuan Garden, has created a digital sculpture resembling the various irregular rocks in the garden.

With a rather avant-garde presentation, the work draws its idea from traditional Chinese landscape paintings, in which painters try their best to indicate a continuous and unlimited world in the limited two-dimensional space.

(Shanghai Daily September 4, 2009)