The Truth Lies In Fact

This video work was part of Yanyun Chen’s 2020 exhibition, False Truths.  Developed in response to the passing of the POFMA or Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill (also referred to as the “Fake News Law”) in Singapore in May 2019, the exhibition engages with the difficulties in defining truth from fiction and recognising fact from representation.  In this series, the artist mixed plastic and silk flowers with real blooms in drawings, prints, and a video work to illustrate how our perceptions of real and false realities might be manipulated. 

In a collaboration with visual effects and CG specialist Alex Scollay, Chen developed prints that made use of Artificial Intelligence to create an animation model capable of rendering images of flowers by mimicking the style of her drawings. They then pushed this experiment further by filming computer generated flower models floating in zero gravity within a Virtual Reality headset, leading to this mesmerising dreamscape called The Truth Lies in Fact, 2019.  The work challenges us to think about how society’s understanding and perceptions of what is truth and fact might be changed through different media and new technologies.