Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

From the butcher shop on the first floor to the social sculpture bar Forbidden in Heaven, Useless in Hell (El Redomon version) on the sixth floor, the space of RAM is covered with dazzling patterns, making the audience unable to distinguish the practical functions of the place at once. On the fifth floor of the exhibition, the pixel series requires viewers to constantly adjust their viewing angles to identify its contents. The artist intends to let the audience feel the extension and distortion of space through these optical illusions, but where does such experience brought by these works come from? From the perspective of vision and cognition, how do human beings recognize the shape and color of objects? How do people's eyes and brain process visual information to understand an image? In the instant of vision capture, what is going on in the brain?

In fact, the principle of the optical illusion effect used by the artist in this exhibition is rooted in the mechanism of our visual system. Some subtle artistic expression techniques also secretly conform to the visual processing. As the science behind art, although it is closely related to life, the principle and mechanism of vision are not understood by many. Starting from illusion, let’s dig into these principle and mechanism to understand how we “watch” with our eyes.

从美术馆一楼 “肉铺”到六楼的社会雕塑“酒吧”，整个空间被炫目的图案所覆盖，让观众无法一下子分辨场所中的实用功能；而展览五楼的像素系列作品需要观众不断调整视角才能识别其中的内容。大量的错视体验呈现了艺术家希望观众在空间的延伸和扭曲，但是究竟这些作品给人带来的体验来自于何处？从视觉和认知角度来分析，人类是如何识别客体的形状和颜色的？人的眼睛与大脑是如何处理视觉信息，去理解一个图像？在视觉捕捉的瞬间中，大脑中又存在着哪些加工？

其实本次展览中艺术家所使用的视错觉效果，其原理扎根于视觉系统本身的机制。一些精妙的艺术表现手法，也暗中符合视觉的加工过程。作为艺术背后的科学，它虽然与生活息息相关，但是其原理和机制并不为大多数人所了解。从错觉开始，我们走进视觉本身运作的原理和机制，了解我们是如何用眼去“观看”的。

Hua Sha, Researcher. PhD in Psychology, Nanyang Technological University. His research interests lie primarily in vision perception and face perception. He is a signed author at Zhihu, who published hundreds of thousand of words at Zhihu, ZhiShiXingQiu, Beijing Youth Daily, Knowledge is power (magazine). He published Kan Lian (See the face, at Bo Ji Tian Juan, 2017).