Total immersion

One of China's finest oil painters has made her first foray into virtual-reality art, a digital debut that has proved to be as painstaking as it was rewarding. Deng Zhangyu reports.

The darkness is broken by a sharp light. All of a sudden, a newborn baby is brought into the world, kicking and screaming. The doctor holds the baby in her arms, walking toward a set of scales.

Everyone in the delivery room－the mother lying on the bed, the doctors in attendance and the infant herself－can be viewed from every angle, just as in the real world. However, these are not actual three-dimensional characters－they have been meticulously painted in oil, and yet can only be viewed in virtual reality.

This is the first scene in artist Yu Hong's virtual-reality work She's Already Gone, which is being exhibited at Beijing's Faurschou Foundation gallery, in what is reportedly the first hand-painted virtual reality work in the world. In it, the Beijing-based artist paints four scenes depicting the four stages of life, from birth to burial.

"Virtual reality allows viewers to immerse themselves in an imaginary world, something that literature, film and traditional painting have been trying to achieve for a long time," says Yu, 52, at her studio in Beijing.

With imagery, sound and music, the eight-minute VR artwork provides the viewer with an immersive experience that bears witness to the four phases of a woman's life, set in different eras of time: a newborn baby in the 1990s; a girl looking out of her bedroom window in the 1970s; a woman from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) unfolding the cloth that had bound her feet since childhood; and a priestess singing at a funeral ritual in the Neolithic era, nearly 5,000 years ago.

Viewers can walk into each of the individually created rooms and view the work from whatever angle they choose.

It took Yu almost a year to finish the work. She had to plan and paint countless details to create each character, from their faces and skin down to locks of their hair. She had to complete more than 60 individual oil paintings to finish the artwork.