For years, digital art has existed in a state of uncertainty. It is everywhere and nowhere at once—circulating endlessly across screens, platforms, and devices, yet constantly questioned for its legitimacy, value, and permanence. Unlike painting or sculpture, digital art has always been defined by its reproducibility. Anyone can copy it, download it, or remix it. For a long time, this quality was treated as a flaw.
The explosion of NFTs briefly promised an answer. By attaching ownership and scarcity to digital files, NFTs attempted to retrofit digital art into the logic of traditional art markets. Value was no longer tied to the image itself, but to its tokenized uniqueness. For a moment, the question of digital art’s legitimacy seemed solved—until the bubble collapsed.
What remained was a deeper unresolved issue: if scarcity is artificial, what actually gives digital art meaning?
Today, that question has resurfaced with new urgency in the age of generative AI. AI systems can now produce images, animations, and environments at unprecedented speed and scale. Creation itself has become easier, faster, and more automated. As a result, the old criteria—technical difficulty, manual labor, even originality—are no longer sufficient on their own. Digital art, once again, is forced to ask what it is for.
Within this shifting landscape, the work and practice of Linyao (Freya) Li offer a grounded perspective. Rather than approaching digital art as a speculative object or a technological novelty, Li’s background situates digital creation inside long-term systems of meaning and use.
Digital art, according to Li, has “always existed in everyday life, long before it was legitimized by markets or institutions.” What is shifting, she adds, is not its visibility but “how seriously we are willing to read it.”
Her career spans major production environments including PlayStation, Blizzard Entertainment, and NVIDIA, where digital imagery is not produced for scarcity, but for persistence.
In large-scale game production, digital art is designed to endure. Characters and environments must remain coherent across years of updates, expansions, and evolving player expectations. They are experienced repeatedly, not collected once. In this context, value is measured not by ownership, but by cultural presence—by how deeply an image embeds itself into collective memory.
That logic extends beyond games and into public space. Li served as a principal creator on A Trip to Infinity, a digital artwork presented as part of the City Digital Skin Art (CDSA) exhibition at the West Lake Sky Screen in Hangzhou, currently the largest 3D naked-eye digital display in Asia.
Installed in a dense urban environment, the work was encountered by millions of passersby—without tickets, ownership, or exclusivity. Here, digital art functioned neither as a collectible nor as a spectacle demanding attention. Instead, it existed as part of the city’s visual atmosphere.
When digital imagery enters public space, Li notes, it no longer behaves like “content” but begins to function as an environment—something people live alongside rather than consume.
If NFTs attempted to assign value through artificial scarcity, and AI challenges value through infinite generation, works like A Trip to Infinity suggest another metric altogether: contextual meaning. Digital art gains significance through where it appears, how it is experienced, and what kind of attention it invites.
AI further sharpens this distinction. When images can be generated endlessly, meaning shifts away from production and toward judgment. What matters is no longer who can make images, but who can decide which images matter, which ones persist, and how they shape perception over time.
“After NFTs and amid AI-generated images, value can no longer rely on scarcity or novelty,” Li says. “It has to come from context—where an image appears, how it’s encountered, and what kind of attention it sustains.”
As society continues to negotiate its relationship with screens, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, the question is no longer whether digital art is “real.” The more urgent question is what kind of cultural role it chooses to play. Digital art matters not because it can be owned or endlessly produced, but because it participates in how contemporary life is visualized.
Practices like Li’s suggest that digital art’s future may be less about objects and more about environments, less about possession and more about presence—and, ultimately, about how images help us understand ourselves in a rapidly changing world.