A Trip to Infinity was presented at the West Lake Sky Screen in Hangzhou.
Contemporary 3D art practice increasingly operates across commercial production, public exhibition, and professional evaluation. As digital imagery moves beyond screen-based entertainment into civic and architectural contexts, production-based expertise is playing a growing role in shaping public visual culture. The practice of Linyao (Freya) Li can be read within this broader shift.
Rather than emerging from a traditional studio-based or gallery-centered model, Li’s practice is shaped by sustained work within large-scale digital production environments. Experience across major pipelines at PlayStation, Blizzard Entertainment, and NVIDIA situates her work within the realities of contemporary 3D production, where artistic decisions are made under technical constraints, collaborative structures, and long development cycles. Within such contexts, character-driven 3D art is developed through systems of visual continuity, iteration, and coordination across teams.
“Working inside large-scale production systems changes how you think about authorship,” Li says. “You’re not designing a single image for impact, but building visual structures that need to remain coherent over time, across teams, and across contexts.”
This production-oriented approach is evident in her contribution as a key monster designer and modeler on Diablo IV and its expansions, where digital characters are not treated as isolated assets but as components within long-term visual frameworks. Emphasis on structural clarity, legibility, and consistency across iterations reflects conditions common to large-scale game production and informs a practice grounded in durability rather than immediacy.
Linyao (Freya) Li is presenting at Adobe Substance Days in Los Angeles.
The same principles extend into public exhibition contexts. A Trip to Infinity, to which Li made a principal creative contribution, was presented as part of the City Digital Skin Art (CDSA) exhibition at the West Lake Sky Screen in Hangzhou. As the largest 3D naked-eye digital display in Asia, the West Lake Sky Screen embeds digital artwork within a high-traffic urban environment, positioning 3D imagery as part of the city’s visual infrastructure rather than within an institutional art setting..
Presented at architectural scale, the work operates differently from screen-based entertainment or gallery installations. Viewers encounter the imagery incidentally, through movement and proximity, rather than through deliberate spectatorship. “In a public urban setting, digital imagery isn’t something people stop to consume,” Li notes. “It becomes part of how a space is experienced—through repetition, movement, and peripheral attention rather than focused viewing.”
Alongside making and exhibiting work, professional evaluation forms another dimension of contemporary digital art practice. Li has served as an Official Judge for the Rookie Awards in 2024 and 2025, an international platform for emerging talent in digital art, games, and visual effects, as well as a judge for MeetMat, an independent creative platform connecting artists and designers across disciplines. These roles situate judgment as an extension of practice, linking production experience with critical assessment across varied creative contexts.
Public discourse further connects these areas of practice. Speaking engagements at Adobe Substance Days and on the Dell Stage at Gnomon frame production knowledge as shared professional criteria rather than individual methodology. Discussions focus on decision-making, standards, and long-term visual development. “What ultimately matters is not the complexity of the technology itself,” Li says, “but how choices are made between technical possibilities and expressive intent, and how the two reinforce one another.”
Taken together, Li’s work across commercial production, public exhibition, professional evaluation, and discourse reflects a model of 3D art practice that moves fluidly between industry and public space. As digital imagery increasingly occupies civic environments alongside entertainment platforms, such practices illustrate how production-based knowledge can shape both public visual culture and the evolving standards of digital art.
