Coronavirus is keeping millions of people locked at home. In response, the art world is trying to make art accessible also from home. Not just institutions, but artists themselves are coping with the matter reinventing the art fruition. How are they managing doing so? Of course, through social media. More and more artists are offering a digitized experience to their audience. Also, many coronavirus related artworks are appearing on the web. A conscious approach aimed to sensibilize a wide audience on the matter.
Art must go on
A couple of husband and wife artists used a video to illustrate the importance of staying home. The only way to stop the virus from spreading. In particular, the digital artwork is a short animated video that shows a row of matchsticks lined up like dominos. When the first of the matches is ignited, the fire passes rapidly to the closer matches, propagating, eventually, to the entire line.
The video creators are based in the USA. In the other part of the world, Italy, which is currently one of the hotbeds of the virus, a local artist uses Simpsons inspired characters to offer advice on the pandemic.
Alexandro Palombo, Milan based activist and contemporary artist, depicts the Simpson family. The purpose is clear since the characters themselves incite people to self-isolate.
Chinese Artists on Coronavirus
Actually, several artists are narrating about the struggling situation through illustrations and pictures. Surely by creating images from their experiences on social media, they offer a record, a kind of evidence of this event.
Cartoonist Kuang Biao depicted and shared via social media, the image of a doctor wearing a barbed wire in the shape of a face mask. The mask appears to perform two main tasks: to protect and to silence. This artwork, in particular, has gone viral on Weibo, the mail Chinese social media platform.
Tommy Fung posted a series of Coronavirus-inspired works on his Instagram page. In particular, the artist, not without humor, portraits people’s reactions to coronavirus in Hong Kong. Fung commented on his latest posts:
“People are very frustrated and distrustful of the ineffectiveness and delayed reactions of the Hong Kong government. The elderly and people with low incomes are the most vulnerable in this situation and they have not received a single mask from the local government.”
Chinese artist Matsuyama Miyabi is known for using female characters in dark and mysterious contexts. To respond to the censorship around the virus she created an artwork called “We Call It Free Will Pt. 2”.