Costume and production designer Tim Yip is widely known for winning an Academy Award for Best Art Direction in 2001 for his work on the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In recent years, Yip has begun experimenting in the new realm of contemporary art to extend his practice of "new Eastern aesthetics".

A new exhibition at the Today Art Museum in Beijing showcases the designer's - and now, artist's - cross-disciplinary efforts to convey his development of Eastern aesthetic values in the field of visual art.

Through July 21, Tim Yip: Mirror makes a comeback to the Beijing museum where he staged his first solo exhibition at the end of 2007. It reviews both his past creations and current interests in scientific research on the human body.

Installations, new media works, sculptures, costumes and photos are all on display, exploring Yip's thoughts on the different ways human beings handle the internal world of the self and the external world around them, particularly in a digital era. He treats the exhibition as a stage on which opera design, Chinese textiles, costume and video production all interact with each other to create an immersive play of his artistic experiences.

Gao Peng, director of Today Art Museum, says when his team began working on the exhibition, they anticipated a display of many of Yip's stage and cinematic art; Yip, however, wanted to renew people's expectations of his work. He wanted to show to people his life as an artist has just begun, and it was a course inspired by but vastly unlike his past achievements in film.

The exhibition embodies Yip's artistic motivations: taking risks.

"Why make art? Certainly not to just make oneself successful," he says. "I think (art) is a reward. It is not to do what you already did ...You need to share with people something truly valuable."

"Tim Yip suggests a profoundly unorthodox way of seeing the world," says exhibition curator Mark Holborn. "His visual intelligence informs us all in whatever creative space we occupy. Inescapably, he is an artist of our time."

Yip considers art as more than endlessly reformatting a single perspective; viewpoints change, particularly with the fluid experiences of an artist. Conveying this mutability, while inspiring an equally adaptable response from viewers, shapes Yip's communication and desire for variability. He sees the world as a great source of curiosity, with endless viewpoints and experiences; above all else, it is this that he wants to present to people - the myriad ways to see the world.