Chinese art to get makeover in Oscar-winning style of NZ filmmaker

One of China's centuries-old artistic traditions is about to be put in a new perspective with the Academy Award-winning style of leading New Zealand film-maker and artist Vincent Ward.

Ward's latest foray into China will see him bringing some of the visual techniques that helped cement his reputation in Hollywood and beyond, and applying them to the ancient art of ink painting.

Best known abroad for directing the Oscar-winning 1998 feature "What Dreams May Come" and as a producer on "The Last Samurai," Ward uses his skills in all the visual arts to develop a trademark style that blends film, photography and new technologies with paint, ink and other traditional media.

He broke new ground with the "motion painting" technique developed for "What Dreams May Come," which won the 1999 Academy Award for best visual effects and was nominated for best art direction.

In the film, the main character, played by Robin Williams, inhabits an afterlife that was created by filming real scenes and then attaching colors and scanned paint strokes to individual pixels, giving the impression of a painting in motion.

BREAKING TRADITION

Now the adjunct professor at New Zealand's University of Canterbury has been invited to introduce new techniques at an ink painting workshop at Shanghai University's Fine Arts College in June.

"Chinese ink painting is amongst the oldest ink painting in the world. It's a rich and strong tradition, so why would you bring somebody from New Zealand to contribute to that?" Ward said in a Skype interview with Xinhua.

"The reason is that we won this Academy Award for 'What Dreams May Come' for combining different media together. And so what I can bring to it is a different way of thinking so that it makes it more contemporary and breaks tradition -- uses tradition, but breaks tradition -- and that's what I do in my own work."

Ward's own "version of ink painting" is combined with photography, painting and macrophotography (extreme close-up photography of small objects).

"I combine it with all sorts of things, all sorts of technologies and I recombine them in a different aesthetic, so it helps revolutionize approaches to these different media," said Ward.

It will be Ward's fifth visit to China in two years, following his multi-media exhibition, "Breath: The Fleeting Intensity of Life," at the Union Church on Shanghai's Bund last year, teaching roles at four Chinese universities and appearances at the Shanghai Literary Festival and the Shanghai Biennale.

This year he will also be on the jury of the Shanghai International Film Festival, where he will present the University of Canterbury's inaugural Vincent Ward Prize for Innovative Film to the winner of the Asian New Talent Award.

The prize includes free return travel, an allowance for two months, accommodation and use of the film school facilities at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch.