Xiaochen is a pattern designer who grew up in Tibet, China. Her work focuses on Tibetan culture and traditional thangka painting.
While studying textiles at the Royal College of Art, she explored Tibetan culture through a combination of materials and 3D digital technology. Through multimedia digital technology she broadens the boundaries of traditional painting and develops themes of flow and movement.
My work revolves around a traditional Tibetan painting from my hometown, the thangka. The thangka visualizes the central Buddhist idea of emptiness - "All natural things have birth and death, there is no eternal existence. Only one's own nature is eternal." Thangka expresses the nature of eternal existence by painting natural elements in their most perfect state of stillness, giving the symbolic meaning of "eternity" to perfect things.
I distort the life process of the natural elements to visualise the "moment". It forms a dichotomy with "eternity". To show the flowing state of the soul conveyed by the thangka. Relying on digital technology to create dynamic patterns, using modelling software and programming techniques, I combined 3D origami sculpture with kinetic patterns. Using wax and acrylic to turn the patterns into solids, the final work represents a combination of digital projection and physical performance to show the beauty of the "moment" from the birth of matter to its dissipation. It conveys a sense of Buddhist feeling.
