A dedicated presentation at New Zone Gallery brings the lead creative technologist’s award-winning Chinese Kung Fu Girl into a shared gallery setting.
At New Zone Gallery in Eugene, Oregon, a dedicated display area in the Fall 2026 Zone 4 All Exhibition features Yixiao Qin’s Chinese Kung Fu Girl. Qin served as the film’s lead creative technologist and director. On view from October 1–31, 2026, the group exhibition brings her award-winning 3D animated short into a physical gallery setting, where visitors can encounter its movement, imagery, and cultural story.
The gallery presentation gives the digitally produced film a place within a shared art space. For Qin, an Oregon-based creative technologist, the exhibition extends the presentation of a project that has already received international award recognition.
At the center of Chinese Kung Fu Girl is a young martial artist whose journey home is interrupted by a monstrous threat. She relies on kung fu to protect herself. The film uses balance, timing, and the force of movement to communicate the character’s resolve, making physical action central to its storytelling.
Qin explores Chinese martial arts through a contemporary visual language, using the heroine’s actions to drive the narrative. Her work on the film extended from story development and preproduction through animation and final rendering. As lead creative technologist and director, she connected the project’s artistic direction with the production methods used to realize it.
The production combines motion capture with keyframe animation. Captured performance provides a physical foundation, while keyframe refinement gives Qin control over poses, timing, and emphasis. This allowed her to shape individual movements to support the character’s performance and the rhythm of each shot.
Working with Maya and Unreal Engine 5, Qin carried the production through 3D animation and real-time rendering. Her decisions connected movement, framing, and visual presentation, ensuring that the technical workflow served the intended storytelling. In this process, the treatment of kung fu became both an animation challenge and an artistic decision: the physical qualities of the movement had to remain convincing while communicating clearly through an animated character.
In 2025, Chinese Kung Fu Girl received Silver recognition in two categories of the MUSE Creative Awards: Video – Animation and Video – Cultural. The two distinctions recognize different aspects of the project—its animated form and its cultural subject matter.
At New Zone Gallery, Chinese Kung Fu Girl is presented as a completed artwork within a broader group exhibition. The display brings Qin’s work as a storyteller, director, and creative technologist into view, showing how animation and digital production can give a traditional martial arts subject a contemporary visual form.
The exhibition offers Eugene audiences an opportunity to encounter the film as both a work of animation and a story shaped by Chinese martial arts. Through the project, Qin brings together narrative development, performance-based animation, and digital production in a work now being presented in a public gallery setting.
