After its launch last year, the event is back for round two. Its founder Gillian Howard shares her insights on her favourite digital artists and the future of the medium
When the inaugural edition of the Digital Art Fair Xperience opened in autumn 2021, it became Asia’s first physical art fair dedicated to digital, NFT and crypto art. This month, the fair is back across a 20,000 sq ft venue in Central. Thousands of digital artworks will be showcased throughout the fair using digital display and metaverse-based virtual reality.
The Immersive Zone of the Xperience show will feature works by London-based Chinese pop artist Jacky Tsai, who is renowned for fusing symbolic references from traditional eastern art with western pop art references. One of his most notable works is Parody of Jay’s Music (2019), a large-scale acrylic painting inspired by the songs of Mando-pop singer and art collector Jay Chou, as well as his China Floral Skull (2021) NFT piece, which sold for US$302,400 at Sotheby’s last year.
Gillian Howard co-founded the fair to provide unique, immersive experiences for Hong Kong audiences, and she brings extensive experience in arts management and passion for new media arts. Ahead of the fair’s second edition, Howard shares her insights on the booming new medium and dispels misconceptions about the speculative hype surrounding it.
Why did you choose to organise an in-person fair for digital art?
There’s a huge misconception about digital art only existing in the virtual space. Digital art started in physical spaces, combining music and installations; it didn’t start on the internet. Showing art virtually has a lot of limitations in terms of what can be shown and how. It’s possible to show a video or graphic virtually, but it’s a lot harder when it’s an AR work or immersive.
Why Hong Kong? Are there any other locations in the pipeline?
I’m from Hong Kong, so it made sense, but also I felt [digital art] was lacking here. We still very much see Hong Kong as the Asian art hub, and now it seems that the crypto and NFT companies are growing here. There are a lot of opportunities in Europe and North America, so we’d like to take the work of Asian artists there and bring the work of Western artists to Asia.
