“Technology is like a paintbrush,” Ottawa digital artist Eric Chan said in a 2017 interview with Algonquin College. “It’s a tool we use to create.” Chan, who works under the name EEPMON, has spent two decades putting that idea into practice, treating lines of code the way a painter treats a brushstroke. Two of the clearest results of this approach, a pair of vibrant, large-scale generative murals, are hanging above the coffee counter at the Ottawa Art Gallery’s Jackson Café, where they have lived since September 2023 and are set to stay through 2027.
The murals, Future Garden and Looking Within the Shadows of the Red Sun, were both generated from custom scripts written by Chan, a Computer Science graduate of Algonquin College, who went on to complete the joint Interactive Multimedia Design program with Carleton University. Rather than painting by hand, Chan writes these custom scripts, tailored sets of algorithmic code that act as digital instructions, directing software to layer colours, multiply geometric shapes, and generate complex visual patterns automatically.
Future Garden leans into atmosphere, aiming for the same sense of calm a walk through a forest might bring, a quiet moment built into a busy café. Looking Within the Shadows of the Red Sun carries more personal weight.
Placing that kind of work in a café instead of a lecture hall matters. It gives anyone ordering a coffee, students included, a low-stakes way to encounter generative art without needing to know what a single line of the underlying code does. That accessibility is part of what makes the murals a fit for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for Quality Education: a public, free space doing more for digital literacy than a locked classroom ever could, simply by making code feel like something worth looking at rather than something to be intimidated by.
According to the Ottawa Art Gallery, Looking Within the Shadows of the Red Sun reworks a painting Chan found in his childhood home, originally made by a friend of his great-grandfather. He translated its imagery, an ox tilling soil against a Chinese folding fan, into a digital motif exploring his own reconnection with Chinese heritage.
Visually, the piece lives up to its evocative title. Swirling in deep crimson, fiery oranges, and dark, brooding shadows, the composition uses hard-edged digital geometry to break apart and reconstruct traditional motifs. The central “red sun” acts as an anchor, while intricate, algorithmic shadows overlap like layers of memory, balancing the warmth of heritage with the sleek precision of modern computing.
A portion of proceeds from prints of the piece supports the Chinese Unit at the Glebe Centre’s long-term care home, rooting the work in the same Ottawa community that walks past it every day.
EEPMON’s reach goes well beyond the café wall. His generative CityLights series, built to shift and pulse in real time, was projected across Times Square in 2021. In 2024, his mural Chaos Bloom - Tidal Wave, patterned on Fibonacci sequences and lunar cycles, went up on the Les Suites parking garage facing the OAG on Daly Avenue, part of the gallery’s Arts Corridor initiative to bring public art into downtown Ottawa.
That same practice carried EEPMON as far as Tokyo’s Prince Takamado Gallery earlier this year, for a solo exhibition co-presented by the OAG and the Embassy of Canada to Japan. Rebecca Basciano, the OAG's chief curator, said the appeal travels well across borders. “EEPMON’s work sits at a fascinating intersection of art and technology,” she noted in a statement published by the Ottawa Art Gallery.
None of that international reach changes what is sitting in the Jackson Café right now. A student who has never written a line of code can still stand under Looking Within the Shadows of the Red Sun and read a family story rendered in colour and algorithm. That is the quiet argument the murals make without needing to explain themselves: a computer script can hold just as much feeling as a paintbrush if someone is willing to write it that way.
Future Garden and Looking Within the Shadows of the Red Sun by EEPMON are on view at the Jackson Café, Ottawa Art Gallery, 50 Mackenzie King Bridge, through 2027. Admission is free.