Explore Shanghai /

'Deeply cultivating industry' is an important direction of the Shanghai University MBA Strategy 2025. The Shanghai University MBA is closely integrated with the strategic development of Shanghai University and the city of striving to go into the world and industry, and cultivating comprehensive development of composite talents. Shanghai University MBA Center serves one of the four brands of Shanghai: Shanghai Culture, and takes advantage of the accumulation of resources of cultural and creative disciplines in the extended campus, cooperates closely with Shanghai University College of Arts, Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts and School of Journalism and Communication, and joins hands with pioneering entrepreneurs and enterprises in cultural and creative industries to launch MBA cultural and creative industry direction, and establishes the industry-academia-research alliance of Shanghai University MBA cultural and creative industry direction, and makes every effort to cultivate cultural and creative industry Cross-border talents.

This event is also part of a series of activities in the direction of cultural and creative industries. The aim of this event is to help students get to know Shanghai as a modern and traditional Chinese city, and to get involved in the city of innovation, humanity and ecology.

SHUMBA students visited Aiiiii Art Center recently, China's first artificial intelligence art centre, to see its opening exhibition The Book of Sand and invited young Hungarian artist Áder Orsolya to give us a professional full English tour, and then visited the studio of Mr. Ma Liang.

Throughout the visit, the MBA students showed strong interest and had in-depth discussions with the guest about the relationship between art and artificial intelligence. For example, the question "Can machines think", can only humans think or create? Do machines have subjectivity? Can machines perceive and create? Such questions essentially questioned the power mechanism between humans and machines explored in this exhibition: does the artist control the machine, or does the machine control the artist?

Special guest:

Mu Lan

Áder Orsolya

Young Hungarian Artist

She started working with jewellery design at the age of 12 and successfully sold her jewellery designs at the Christmas exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts. She graduated from the "American International University" in Richmond, London, with a degree in Fashion Business, Art and Design and Media. She is now a freelance artist with a love of abstract painting styles and an eye for art philosophy. In recent years, she has held several solo exhibitions in Hungary, Spain, Romania and China, where the visual impact of her artworks has been well received by local audiences. Her artworks were also recently presented at the 2021 West Coast Art & Design Fair (11-14 November).

The students then went to the studio of Mr. Ma Liang, an alumnus of the School of Fine Arts, Shanghai University. Mr. Ma Liang is the first Chinese photographer to win a gold medal at the World Black and White Photography Awards and has been hailed by the international media as a representative of contemporary stage installation style photography. During this visit, Mr Ma Liang led us into his studio to learn about the stories behind his works, and to feel the craftsmanship and unique charm of artistic creation.

Special guest:

MA Liang

Contemporary Chinese Artist.

He began his professional art studies at the age of 12 and graduated from the School of Fine Arts of Shanghai University in 1995 with a degree in design. He is the most influential conceptual photographer in China and the first Chinese photographer to win the gold medal of the World Black and White Photography Award.

What SHUMBAers say

2021GLFT ZHANG Xu, DANG Ye

The Book of Sands exhibition is a two-fold response to the paradoxical nature of human society, with the ruins of the industrial age on one side, and the artificial intelligence of the emerging age on the other, the revelatory power of philosophy striking at the heart. Out of the mundane, unadorned industrial ruins, a highly fantastical scene of illusion, the eternity of time, the absurdity of existence, the erosion of individuality and man's search for his own value is created. The relationship between human and artificial intelligence has always been the most controversial topic of our time, and the exhibition explores the most controversial topic with the audience in the most pioneering art form: is it human-machine unity, or is it me-or-machine-oriented? I believe that after seeing the exhibition, everyone will have their own answer in mind.

Nothing impressed me more than the ever-changing butterfly in the Great Compassion Universe, which is the most successful piece of human-computer interaction, where artificial intelligence and the artist achieve each other and ultimately the viewer. Each viewer can have a unique butterfly, which disappears from a platform and flies to each viewer's phone. When the photo of this butterfly in your phone is deleted, it means that this butterfly will disappear from the world forever. The real world of butterflies vows towards flowers, and the seemingly virtual eternal butterfly does not seem to be eternal. For the electronic butterfly that cannot dominate its own existence, it is full of tragedy, and one cannot help but feel compassionate and want to guard this most unique being in the world. The butterfly is a unique symbol in Chinese culture, embodying the spiritual realm of Chinese philosophy of "the unity of heaven and man", breaking down the barriers between the subject and the object, and dissolving the barriers between the object and me, which is the cyberpunk with oriental cultural heritage, and which is the best artificial intelligence in my heart.

Through this exhibition, I was able to appreciate the creativity of artificial intelligence in the field of art, and it made me think about whether the perspective of human intelligence is the only one that exists in this universe. In the artworks created by AI, I saw a great number of fragments of real society, with land, farmland, laws, oceans and so on. One day when AI appears in the world as something closer to a human being, it will surely bring about a great change and I believe that day will surely come.

2021GLFT JIN Yu

Shanghai's new landmark for digital art and artificial intelligence art - Aiiiii Art Center, Hot Supply Station Digital Art Community. The opening exhibition, "The Book of Sand", is magical! All the artworks are created by computer AI, fascinating and frightening, the world created by AI is really full of confusing imagination!

The exhibition uses the short story "The Book of Sand" as an introduction, comparing intelligently generated art, which is full of infinity and randomness, to the author Borges' book "The Book of Sand", which has no beginning and no end, and is as unpredictable as sand, through literary imagination. The multiple fleeting intelligently generated artworks build a poetic and romantic space where machines and humans work together. One can't help but start to wonder if AI intelligence will replace humans? Will we be working for machines?

2021GC&GI FT1B QIN Jiamin

When you step into the park, you can see a giant magical creature, colourful, industrial and particularly overbearing, then we start our exhibition, many parts of the exhibition are done by machines and humans together, the most impressive one is "Virtual Butterfly", each audience can claim their own unique butterfly, super fun and meaningful! In the flue area there were also works from The Text Gene Project, poems written by algorithms, full of storytelling and the ability to interact with machines to write poems, very novel!

During the afternoon's exhibition, we deeply felt the interaction between AI and art, where we could feel the boundless, endless and wonderfully magical AI creativity like sand, believing that in the future, human consciousness and AI will create a more harmonious artistic model with continuous adjustment and integration.

This news is about the visit of SHU MBA students to the exhibition "The Book of Sand" at the Aiiiii Art Center on 30 November.

供稿人：王苗苗&2021GLFT张玉巧