Xuan Chen

Gallery Affiliations: Richard Levy Gallery

Region: West

I explore cognitive responses to visual illusion with a painter’s approach, reflecting the growing contemporary artistic practice of seeking the crossover between new technologies and aesthetics. The colors and composition of each work are generated with 3D imaging, yet the handmade quality of painting is deliberately exposed. In the finished paintings, the edges are not perfect, the perspective is not absolutely correct, and the distances between stripes are not equal. Our brain automatically reprocesses the images, and we can see mistakes and errors on the painted surfaces. I also exaggerate the errors in computer-generated 3D images, revealing the red, green or blue alpha channels within the digital images. These errors contradict our brain’s interpretation of familiar images and lead us to believe that the painted image is an optical illusion.