Vincent Lai Interview

Chapter X: Symphony

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Posted by Vincent Lai \

www.aw8.net — on December 09, 2003

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Vincent Lai

Hong Kong SAR / Hong Kong

www.aw8.net

Hi everyone, I am Vincent Lai. Most of the people know me as Night Angel or niteangel, and actually I am a perfect boy. This angelic name actually comes from my first girlfriend, but gradually it becomes my identity over the web and I don't bother to change it. I study architecture, and have just been graduated from university. I am currently working in an architectural firm as a trainee. Besides the main job I also work as a part-time web and graphic designer.

Anyway, I haven't been an abstract artist until early March 2003. I was fooling around and I discovered some 3d-abstract tutorials and wallpapers. I was so interested in them and I started to make something in Bryce. At the same time I joined several art communities and posted my works. That was the time I started my 3d-abstract art life.

Spellbound

SOLO WORK

It is really fun as a matter of fact to do this kind of art. It is more than visual, and it is more than lighting. To be honest, in the world full of glass Bryce renderings, good abstract art is hard to be good, but to me it is a kind of challenge. I can't really say what makes me different from the other artists, but I know clearly what I want to express via the images. I seek ideas from everywhere, and I can imagine the impossible becoming of the little things around me. When I look at a flower, I can imagine the inside: how energy is flowing in the flower, and spreads to different parts of it and finally to the cells. Then it forms a vivid picture in me and I feel the need to draw it and make this visible to other people. That's how most of my art comes out.

This is exactly how good 3d-abstract art can be. They don't need very solid and obvious forms as they don't need to be precise. They don't need correct lighting, as they just need light to form the dynamic parts of the image. They are so free that you can just do what you can think of. However, that is also the reason why 3d-abstract can be difficult. They have no guidelines, and have no basic. People will follow the others easily because they don't know what to do. They can't believe that they can work out everything they can think of, and instead they copy the previous works of others.

3d-abstract art let me open my mind, and think more beyond the surfaces of the surroundings. Also it strengthens my belief that your imagination has nothing to do with impossibility. If you can think, you can make it. It helps my architectural studies too, and surprisingly architecture also affects my abstract art, as one can see from Edifice and Recticore, two my recent images.

Versus

You probably know that I am actually a web-designer. I never say I am good at 3d-abstract art, but I am not ashamed to say I am good at web-designing. I have been doing web stuff for 5 years, and web-designing is the most enjoying thing in my life. Last month the latest version of my website is up, Angelworld 8. It is titled the Essence of Angels, because it is a summary of what I learnt in the past 15 months, showing off my skills and ideas. When I was drafting this, I was not just hoping that the new Angelworld could contain my artworks, but also that it could inspire the people both on the Internet and outside the Internet. Design is art with functionality, and art is not just for artists. I hope people outside the field can appreciate what I did too, and so a good interface has to be thought about seriously before being made.

The real challenge, like other websites, is how to combine functionality with the layout design. It is very easy to be fancy and ignore the 'userability' of an interface. Angelworld 8 is actually a bit on the fancy side, but luckily it also meets most of the requirements I have set for the userability of the site. You may not realize how much time I took to create the layout of Angelworld 8. I spent over 2 months to plan it, and used a month to make a draft to test the functionality of it, like testing the menus and buttons. Then animations were added and fortunately they worked out very nice with the design.

Another pain when creating the site is to combine the PHP and database coding with the Flash things. Programming took most of the time in the whole making process. It is even more painful when you cannot see any error message in Flash, unlike the normal PHP in HTML rendering. The new Angelworld is actually running with a PHP-framework, codenamed AWSpell. It is a PHP base for the whole site, sharing libraries and infrastructures to join different parts of the site together. The site contains many interactive elements like forum, Ecard center, commenting systems and search engines, and even some contents are generated by the database. This means a good PHP+mySQL system is needed for the site to run properly and fast.

The main change of the new Angelworld is the integration between the forum and the main site. The reason for this is to add more interaction between the readers, generating more discussions on art and design. I believe it is only through conversation can different people learn new skills and ideas. Of course, the new site is a collection of my artworks. I started my abstract art life after the release of Angelworld 7, and that site was unable to hold my art as I didn't expect abstract art to come at that time. That's why I needed a site to showcase my works so badly. New contents are added while the previous information is reorganized. I am so thrilled to have my friends Kate and Crunch to create the lovely music for the site, which adds a wonderful retouch to the whole website. I am also very happy to have a group of members who are so helpful and supportive. I don't know if my abstract art inspires anyone and make them think more, but I am sure the new Angelworld has the power to push the field of web-design to another level!

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