Emotions are what drive humans to do the things that we do. Whether it is a psychological response or a behavioral one, our emotions begin with an experience that is unique to each of us. For many years, we have built an association of visual forms such as colors, weather, expressions, and more to convey emotions in complex ways. Just like how blue is used to describe gloom, and a sunny day may indicate positivity and happiness, the way humans perceive emotions has evolved. One prominent artist is pushing the bounds for a deeper understanding of what triggers our feelings. British artist and director, Saad Moosajee uses multiple mediums of art focused on the visual aesthetics that further develop the complexities of expressing, experiencing, and resonating with emotions through his works.
情绪是驱动人类去实施行动的动力。无论是心理反应还是行为反应，我们的情绪都始于自己的独有体验。多年来，我们建立了一种与情绪有关的视觉形式上的关联，如颜色、天气、表情等，以复杂的方式传达情感。就像蓝色经常被用来描述忧郁，阳光明媚的日子可能预示着积极和幸福一样，人类感知情绪的方式也在进化。有这样一位杰出的艺术家正在突破界限，以更深入地了解触发我们的感受因素。英国艺术家兼导演 Saad Moosajee 使用多种艺术媒介，专注于视觉美学，更深入地探索如何作品来表达、体验和与情感产生共鸣的复杂性。
About the artist
关于艺术家
Artist Saad Moosajee, who is now based in Brooklyn, works through many mediums to work across many genres to create new ways of building narratives. Having graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, he uses Photoshop, Cinema 4D, and Poser to create visually stunning surreal worlds that are visceral and otherworldly. Using his experience in animation, design, and visual effects, he experiments with old and new visual techniques to arouse notions of timeless art.
Saad Moosajee 现在居住在布鲁克林，他通过多种媒介，跨众多流派来创造新的叙事方式。从罗德岛设计学院毕业后，他使用 Photoshop、Cinema 4D 和 Poser 创造了视觉上令人惊叹的超现实世界，这些世界是他发自本能的创作，超凡脱俗的。运用他在动画、设计和视觉效果方面的经验，他的视觉实验将新的和旧的视觉技术结合起来，以唤起永恒艺术的概念。
Now an adjunct teacher at the School of Visual Arts, he has risen to prominent fame and worked with the world’s leading brands, talents, and institutions such as the Radiohead frontman, Thom Yorke, Mitski, The New York Times, and Google. His work has also been featured in The Hammer Museum, Sharjah Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum of Moving Image and won several prestigious awards from SXSW, Forbes, D&AD, and The Art Directors Club.
Saad现在是视觉艺术学院的兼职教师，他声名鹊起，并与世界领先的品牌、人才和机构合作，如 Radiohead 主唱、Thom Yorke、Mitski、纽约时报和谷歌。 他的作品还曾在 The Hammer 博物馆、沙迦当代艺术博物馆和动态影像博物馆展出，并获得了 SXSW、福布斯、D&AD 和艺术指导俱乐部的多个著名奖项。
Self-taught from the age of 15
从15岁开始自学
Still from the video for Joji’s 777, directed by Saad Moosajee
From an early age, Saad was interested in the art of visual storytelling, learning different types of software in artistic ways. From the age of 15 he set out to fulfill his vision, however, unlike the fortunate artists of today, there were not as many tutorials that were available to the public and online video platforms such as Youtube were not as developed as they are now. Saad would experiment with the artistic usage of different software while taking references from the fantastic works of H.R. Giger and Salvador Dali. Inspired by their works, he would go on to work as a freelancer and become a creative director at Slashthree.
Saad 从小就对视觉叙事的艺术感兴趣，以艺术为方向学习不同类型的软件。从 15 岁开始，他就开始慢慢朝着实现自己的愿景而努力，然而，与今天幸运的艺术家们不同，彼时公众可以获得的教程并不多，Youtube 等在线视频平台也没有现在这样发达。Saad 不断尝试不同软件的艺术用途，同时以H.R. Giger 和 Salvador Dali 的精彩作品为参考。受到他们作品的启发，他以自由职业者的身份工作，并成为 Slashthree 的创意总监。
Through his experience, he would further be inspired by graffiti artists such as Banksy and his surrounding environment. This would lead him to jump into the path of becoming an artist by exploring deeper themes surrounding emotion and aesthetics. Using videos as his “playground” to push the boundaries of animation, he would mark technological advancement as one of the key factors of his work.
通过此前经历，他进一步受到 Banksy 等涂鸦艺术家和周围环境的启发。这引导他一跃而达艺术的层面，通过探索围绕情感和美学的更深层次的主题，走上了艺术家的道路。使用视频作为他的“游乐场”来突破动画的界限，他将技术进步标记为他作品的关键元素之一。
Creating phantom worlds for Thom Yorke
为 Thom Yorke 创建幻影世界
Thom Yorke- “Last I heard”, directed by Saad Moosajee
The abstract narrative is the most suitable phrase that comes to mind when thinking of Saad Moosajee’s works. When he was tasked with creating a music video for Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, he set out to devise an experience that is not only personal but also unforgettable.
抽象叙事，是看到 Saad Moosajee 的作品时所联想到的最合适的词组。当他受命为 Radiohead 的 Thom Yorke 制作音乐视频时，他着手设计一种不仅是个人的，而且是令人难忘的体验。
The music video, “Last I heard” features a gloomy world full of ghostly human-like figures wandering through the darkness where the dark and light contrasts highlight our sense of emotions when feeling anxiety and isolation. The artist accomplishes this strangely alluring dark fantasy using 3D animation combined with hand-painted rotoscoping, creating a fluid and rough visual aesthetic.
《Last I heard》的MV描绘了一个阴暗的世界，充满了幽灵般的人形，在黑暗中徘徊，黑暗和光明的对比突出了我们在感到焦虑和孤立时的情绪感。 艺术家使用 3D 动画与手绘转描的方法相结合，完成了这种诡异诱人的黑暗幻想，营造出流畅而粗犷的视觉美感。
“While there is a stylistic crossover between all of my projects, It’s important to me that each video can function as a standalone piece aesthetically. I believe this makes the experience of watching it more memorable and allows the audience to create a longer-lasting connection. “Last I Heard” is a deeply personal work that explores different concepts of urban anxiety and isolation. I believe the most important test of a video is whether or not it can evoke an emotional response – I always strive for this.”
“虽然我所有的项目在风格上都有交集，但对我来说，重要的是每个视频都可以在美学上成为一个独立的片段。我相信这会让观看它的体验更加难忘，并让观众建立更持久的联系。《Last I Heard》是一部非常个人作品，探讨了城市焦虑和孤立的不同概念。我相信对视频最重要的测试是它是否能唤起情感反应——我一直在为此而努力。”
– Saad Moosajee
Building animated worlds with 3000 frames
用 3000 帧构建起动画世界
Mitski- “Pearl”, directed by Saad Moosajee
Working with studio Art Camp and animator Danaé Gosset, Saad Moosajee worked on his new project for the music video for “Pearl” by American singer, Mitski. The artist believes that this was the most ambitious world-building that he had done for any project. Balancing the story and impressive attention to detail, Saad creates a colorful abstract world that has a total of 3000 individually mastered frames. Each frame is a meticulous amalgamation of traditional and digital mediums including 3D animation, crowd simulation, charcoal painting, oil paint primer, crayons as well as stop motion photography.
Saad Moosajee 与Art Camp工作室，还有动画师 Danaé Gosset 一起合作，为美国歌手 Mitski 的《Pearl》MV制作了他的新项目。这位艺术家认为，这是他迄今为止所有项目中做的最雄心勃勃的一次世界建筑。Saad 平衡了故事和对细节的深刻关注，创造了一个色彩缤纷的抽象世界，共有 3000 幅独立的帧。每一帧都是传统和数字媒体的精心融合，包括 3D 动画、人群模拟、木炭画、油画底漆、蜡笔画以及定格摄影。
While Saad’s works feature heavy use of surreal moments that capture our hearts, his works are by contrast very grounded in reality. It is the sense of realism of motion, movement, and perspective that all make the story more captivating. For “Pearl” the artist would reference real-life videos of people and he would also film himself ripping fabrics and falling sideways to recreate them. Interestingly, one of the key references that Saad received that he marveled at was Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane and falling from the sky in the movie, Mission Impossible: Fallout.
虽然Saad的作品中大量灵感是基于捕捉我们心灵的超现实时刻，但相比之下，他的作品却非常扎根于现实。正是运动，移动，透视关系这些所营造出的现实主义的感觉使得叙事更加引人入胜。对于《Pearl》这部作品，艺术家会参考现实生活中人们的视频，他还会拍摄自己撕开织物，并侧身摔倒以重现它们。有趣的是，Saad收到的令他惊讶的参考视频之一是汤姆克鲁斯在电影《碟中谍：辐射》中从飞机上跳下来从天而降。
“One of the first references that were given to me was from Mission Impossible: Fallout. There’s one scene where Tom Cruise jumps out of an airplane — a really long shot of him falling through the sky. It’s a technical achievement, none of it green-screened or computer-generated. Tom Cruise actually jumps out of a plane. That was given as a reference of what it feels like emotionally for a person to fall in a strenuous scenario.”
“给我的第一个参考视频来自《碟中谍：辐射》。有一个场景是汤姆克鲁斯从飞机上跳下来——这是他从天上坠下的一个很长的镜头。这是一项技术成就，不是绿屏或计算机生成的。汤姆克鲁斯实际上是从飞机上跳下来的。这是一个人在剧烈情景中跌倒时情绪上所感受的参考。”
Mixed with the powerful vocals and strumming of Mitski’s guitar, the final result is a 1,480 frame hand-made video that follows a woman navigating through abstract environments that reenact a thrilling and natural visual interpretation of an emotional journey.
结合 Mitski 强劲的演唱和弹奏的吉他，最终的结果是一段由1480帧，手工绘制的视频，该视频跟随一位女性在抽象环境中导航，重新演绎了一段激动人心且自然的情感旅程的视觉诠释。
Why NFT was the next step and what’s to come
为什么 NFT 会成为下一步，即将发生的是什么
Prominent artists have sometimes been known to shun NFTs due to the speculative and commercial nature of their current market, however, Saad Moosajee thinks otherwise. For the artist, technology has paved his career path with which he is able to experiment and learn from it to realize new artistic visions like he set out to do so from the age of 15. He believes that as a digital artist, NFTs will be the next step of artistic evolution that should be embraced. NFTs not only expose artists to a wider audience of collectors but also completely changes the way art and artists are managed as a whole.
由于当前市场的投机和商业性质，知名艺术家有时会避开 NFT，但 Saad Moosajee 不这么认为。对于艺术家来说，技术为他的职业道路铺平了道路，他可以通过它进行实验和学习，以实现新的艺术愿景，就像他从 15 岁开始就开始那样做的一样。他相信，作为一名数字艺术家，NFT将会被接纳，这是艺术进化的下一步。NFT不仅将艺术家呈现给更广泛的收藏家受众，而且还彻底改变了艺术和艺术家的整体管理方式。
“The Gaze” NFT by Saad Moosajee
Saad created his first NFT series for SuperRare titled, “Verses” which explores themes surrounding life after death, South Asia futurism, the reinterpretation of classical paintings, and surrealism. Through this series of digital artworks, the artist aims to bring light to a unique futuristic world with the spin of European classical painting techniques and themes to spread out a rich and visually gripping narrative that coexists in his surreal universe.
Saad 为 SuperRare 创建了他的第一个 NFT 系列，名为“Verses”，探索了围绕死后生活、南亚未来主义、古典绘画的重新诠释和超现实主义的主题。通过这一系列的数字艺术作品，艺术家们旨在为一个独特的未来世界带来光明。以欧洲古典绘画技巧和主题为特色，展开了一个丰富且在视觉上引人入胜的叙事，并在他的超现实世界中共存。
“The Awakening” NFT by Saad Moosajee
Since his first NFT drop, Saad Moosajee is set to drop his second installment of the “Verses” series. The artist hopes to continue experimenting with NFTs to make new experiences and is interested in realizing the potential of arising or developing technologies such as 3D animation and the Metaverse to “create diverse futures that act as modern historical reenactments and rewritings.”
自从他的第一个 NFT 诞生以来，Saad Moosajee 放弃了他的“Verses”系列的第二部分。这位艺术家希望继续尝试 NFT 以创造新的体验，他对正处新兴状态或正在开发中的 3D 动画和元宇宙等技术的潜力充满兴趣，因为这些正在“创造作为现代历史重演和改写的多样化未来”。
“I feel like this is one of the most important things, and something hugely promising about the NFT movement. Artists supporting and actively communicating with each other is inspiring on many levels.”
“我觉得这是最重要的事情之一，也是 NFT 运动中非常有希望的事情。艺术家们相互支持和积极交流，在许多层面上都鼓舞人心。”
– Saad Moosajee
*all images and artworks belong to the artist & his representing galleries respectively
*所有图像和艺术品分别属于艺术家及其他们代表的画廊
For more information on the artist, please click here
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Translation 翻译 Rona Xia
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