Anish Kapoor Partners with LG as Asian Tech Giants Push Their Devices
While Apple, Alphabet, and Meta are developing mixed reality offerings behind the scenes, Asian tech companies including LG and HONOR are publicly collaborating with artists.
Anish Kapoor. Photo George Darrell.
Korean electronics brand LG showed an early digital work by Anish Kapoor at Frieze Seoul last week. Entitled Wounds and Absent Objects II, a sequel to a 1998 video that embraces colour with gradual transitions from crimson to ultramarine and back again.
'More and more I wanted to make work towards experiences and away from form, in a way that something literally draws you in, that literally gives you a sense of vertigo, disorientation, whatever, so it becomes more and more a physical experience,' Kapoor said in a statement.
Kapoor's work was displayed on new rollable TVs, which collapse down into their bases, in the LG OLED Lounge during the fair's VIP Opening Reception. The Lounge also featured sculptures and NFTs by New York-based artist Barry X Ball.
Ball has long incorporated digital scanning, virtual modelling, 3D printing, and computer-controlled milling into his practice.
Ball will be the first artist to release an NFT via the LG ART LAB, a new digital art marketplace backed by the Hedera network.
Samsung, whose Frame TVs are designed to resemble framed artworks, announced its own partnership with an NFT platform, the hugely popular Nifty Gateway, in March this year. The partnerships allows users to browse, buy, and display NFTs using their TVs.
Chinese smartphone brand HONOR, which separated from parent company Huawei in 2020, recently conducted their own partnership with artists to signal their commitment to the metaverse.
They commissioned AR artists Yunuene and Timo Helgert to transform Hamburg's Wasserschloss, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located between two canals.
Yunuene created a work that celebrated the city's maritime history, while Helgert's work imagines the canals being reclaimed by nature.
'From an artist's point of view, the more companies that are investing into AR the merrier – it will only provide better tools for us to work with,' Helgert told Ocula Magazine.
'AR today already lets my audience engage with my art in ways that are not possible with any other media,' he said. 'I'm fascinated by where this technology will take us.' —[O]
