Rutgers-Camden Artist Plots for Digital Art Demand in Native China’s Art Boom

CAMDEN - While a strong economy continues to fuel high prices for Chinese contemporary art, not all genres have yet to be discovered there. A Rutgers-Camden artist who specializes in fusing digital animation onto natural surfaces predicts that the Chinese art scene soon will experience a second wave that is anything but traditional.

The success of Chinese artists has been widely noted; the 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s record-breaking auctions alone netted $190 million for contemporary Asian art.  But what’s currently selling in China reflects traditional tastes: oil paintings and Chinese print making. Native Chinese artist LiQin Tan, an associate professor of fine arts at Rutgers University—Camden, where he directs the animation program, predicts that eventually collectors will want to invest in new media.

“Right now they don’t even study animation installation in China. There is money there, but only for art the buyers understand,” Tan says. He has been publishing articles in Chinese art journals that express his ideas on contemporary animation education. “Animation should be understood as a tool to explore fine arts forms, not just to produce commercial products for money alone.”

After studying traditional ink brush painting and editing the art magazine Painter in China, Tan migrated to Canada, where he furthered his studies. While in China, Tan studied with and even published the works of some of today’s hottest Chinese artists, including Zhang XiaoGang, Wang GuangYi, and Gu WenDa.

“I published painters in the 80s who are now receiving acclaim. I didn’t know a change was coming in the Chinese art world, I just wanted change,” says Tan, who points to 1985 as when artists broke with tradition and began experimenting with more Western art concepts.

Tan’s work, which is inspired by Chinese Taoist thought and digital animation, has been honored with Best of Show at the International Digital Metal and Art Conference in Orlando; Award of Excellence from Period Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska; Award of Excellence from Gallery International in Baltimore; and first place in the Digital Art & Animation Competition at the Beecher Center for Art & Technology at the Butler Institute of American Art. 

A former brush-figure painting instructor in Hengyang Teachers’ College in China and artist for Disney’s Saturday morning cartoons, Tan currently teaches three-dimensional animation and multimedia courses at Rutgers-Camden. Born in China, he currently lives in Cherry Hill.

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