Nothin Holy is a digital artwork that examines the intersection of colonial violence and cultural appropriation through the metaphor of decapitated Buddha statues in Western museums. The piece features a headless Buddha figure in a meditation pose, with a black void replacing the head and fragmented pieces floating in space. This visual representation critiques both the physical dismemberment of sacred artifacts through looting and the conceptual fragmentation that occurs when spiritual practices like mindfulness are stripped of their cultural context.

Created in collaboration with a Kashmiri musician, this interdisciplinary project challenges artificial borders while creating dialogue across cultural differences.

Tools

Blender

Category

3D Design

This project was an opportunity for me to hone my procedural 3D skills. Outside the stone sculpture model, everything is procedurally generated using Blender's visual shading and geometry nodes. The water, sky, black hole, and randomly scattered artifacts are all procedural.

Sitting Buddha clothing 3D model created by Htun Htun Win.

For this project, I created a "digital mirage" that invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with illusion, perception, and emotional experience. Traditional mirages are observed from a distance, tantalizingly unreachable. I deliberately transgress this expectation by placing the viewer directly within the mirage.

My vision for this work is to provide a meditation on the nature of joy and desire. The oasis represents our dreams and aspirations, the things we chase across metaphorical deserts of everyday life. I aimed to harness the power of CGI to create impossible characters of palm trees that bend and spiral, exaggerating the mirage. I used rigging to move the tree trunks, and cloth simulations for the leaves to get cartoony yet believable movements.

Tools

Blender

Category

3D Animation