Gems and Dragons. The Digital Art of Shan Hua

A tornado girl, whose hair moves with every sweep of the wind. A desolate novelist, writing about marine creatures flowing with the wind. An omnipotent eye, looking for the most beautiful person in the world in order to find true love. 

Those creatures, created not of flesh and blood, but of digital crystals and delicate limbs, share the mental DNA of their creator: Shan Hua. Award-winning in Cannes, she has several Vogue collaborations, generated graphics for Rihanna, and gives the mythological potential to the everyday. We talked to Shan about her journey from flesh-and-bone creation to harnessing the power of AI.

From Needles and Threads to Digital Brushes

The journey from immaculate tailoring to virtual realities starts at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. This is where Shan completed her BA course, as a designer capable of creating both menswear and womenswear. Next, she started a post-graduate course at the Royal College of the Arts in London, however, due to Covid, it was an online course. As always, the pandemic changed everything: already an avid gamer, Hua decided to give digital art a try. 

Starting with the Blender training, she quickly expanded her expertise and now uses an array of different softwares: from rendering engines, to specialist artistic tools like ZBrush, which combines modeling, texturing and painting. The designer claims that the skill that helped her the most was her spatial orientation and intuition. „Before using the digital softwares, I studied stage design, so I knew how to use the 3D software. It was a very smooth transition for me”, says Hua. 

Shocked to see the realism of AI art, she decided to give the text-to-image model Midjourney a try. While now she uses Adobe’s AI tools, Midjourney and AIMotion on a daily basis, at first she was surprised by how the process of acquiring artificial intelligence skills resembles a tedious artistic training. “The process of working with Ai is actually a very difficult one to master, and sometimes what I imagine in my mind is completely different from what it provides”, she said. If she could create any AI tool, she wouldn’t use it for rendering or texturing. “I would like it to be able to read my mind”.

Crystal Hair and Floating Diamonds

The transition from mental to embodied is limiting, but it can also open new perspectives, and even break the cage of the usual five senses. 

„In fashion, touch is very important”, says Shan. „The fabric, the textile: they make everything different. But when you are in the digital realm, it’s very hard to express yourself through fabric”. When everything is a jigsaw puzzle, no movement and no frame are accidental. As a fashion designer, Shan was already escaping the cage of physical limitations by immersive storytelling – and the virtual brought myriads of new layers. 

„I am good at creating fables”, explains the designer. „When I translate the physical into the digital, I use the same inspirations and the same way of telling my story. In the physical realm, you can touch and you can smell, but there are no such senses in virtual art. Instead, I use more animation, more dynamism, more movements in my digital work. I work in different realities: one of my art avatars has a hair made out of precious stones. Obviously, in the real world, you can’t have floating, crystal hair, but in the digital realm – more layers are available.”

Liminal Spaces

Following her diploma at RCA, Shan moved to London, where she is now the Art Director of the designer wholesale store Shyness Space. She had lived in London for 2 years. „Cultures mixed together for me”, claims the designer. „I grew up in China, but now I’m living in London – and what I’m doing is just exploring myself, finding myself more deeply, and through that way people can see both my background and what I am now.”

And the answers are not definitive. Shan is an expert of frame tales, metaphysical portals between worlds. In her short VR film „The Novelist”, which won the Best Virtual Reality short film award at the Cannes World Film Festival 2024, the viewpoint changes from frame to frame. 

At first, the viewer observes secret life of marine creatures, which turn out to be the creation of a robotic novelist, who, in turn, turns out to be a result of somebody else’s imagination. This allows her to the variety of avatars that she is able to bring to life. However, it also serves a deeper purpose: a continuation of generations of artistic traditions, for example – traditional Chinese „fable in a fable” structure, which survives in Hua’s imaginary worlds.

From Fables to Wholesale

Cultural heritage shows itself in forms of different models of fascination. “In the UK, people are in love with things that can be tactile, handmade. They love manuscripts and they are so curious about strictly human creativity”, she says. Compared to British wait-and-see attitude towards both digital and AI, China presents itself as a land of different dimensions. “AI painting and related AI tutorials become very popular in China”, mentions the artist. “People are more enthusiastic about AI than ever before. Even my parents joined AI painting classes.”

Shan seamlessly crosses the bridge between technological mystery and everyday fascination – just as she crosses the borders of continents. Working with fashion media allows her to present cutting-edge tools in a way that’s understandable for a non-tech-savvy audience. 

This February, during the Chinese New Year, if you were to open the page of Shyness Space, a digital dragon would fly to you. At the same time mystical and modern, perfectly suited to the sleek garments that Shyness offers, it catalyses the best elements of Shan’s work: a technological wonder coming from ancient mythology, innovative and yet, so close to your world.