Science & Art collaboration: the starting up of Enhancer in Art

Encounter with Artist

Zijun is a master student who study in École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence Félix Ciccolini (ESAAIX), France. Before she switched into art, she was a product manager of IT company in China and Japan. The first time we met happened in the art exposition of Jeff Koons in Europe and Mediterranean Civilization Museum of Marseille. She introduced me an initial perspective on how to view art exhibitions that I had never set foot in. We talked each other about our working field, and realizing the potential collaboration because we both interested in cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Explorer in biological lab

So we started to explore the possibility of collaboration. We arranged a coffee meeting with Davide (ENHPATHY project manager) in the library of campus. We discussed the program plan of Enhancer in Art, what artist need from art part, what we can provide from science part and how to start up step by step. It’s very well and fully-discussed meeting between researcher, artist and manager. For knowing biology working better, I invited Zijun to visit our laboratory to show our daily scientific work. Zijun showed great interest in our daily biological experiment stuff and some materials we always ignored.

Researcher in artist working shop

In a campus opening weekend, I visited Zijun’s art college and working place in Aix-en-Provence, which locate in hometown of the famous Post-Impressionism artist, Paul Cézanne. It’s an impressive and novel conception explosion experience for me, as a person outside of art. The art working direction in ESAAIX involve all kinds of stuffs for material exploring and conception construction, like materials of plastic, wood, steel, silk, paper, ceramics; the conception of human body structure, gender, electronic games, machinery, 3D printing; the form of sound, visual, action, sense of touch. The painting only takes small part of modern art. All of these opened my mind to explore the crossing between biology research and art. And also let me know what kind of materials could be useful for artist and what kind of space and environment condition required by special art work.

Generally, I felt different kinds of working possibility and exciting for the following work. In the next, we are going to write a general proposal and exchange our idea for the concrete material, conception and format of Enhancer in Art.

Artist working shop and art works in creating
ESAAIX campus opening weekend

ESR, artist, KOM agency founder, scientist in Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille

 

writing and photos: Jing Wan

modified: Zijun Feng