Can you tell us about your practice?
My practice examines how current technologies—especially in cross-cultural contexts—affect politics, societies, and the implicit and explicit relationships between systems at both macro and micro levels.
The topics of my recent projects include algorithm control and bias, alternative networks and infrastructure, digital labor rights, AI archaeology, planetary-scale computation, and world-building. I translate these ideas through animated video, augmented reality, interactive video installations, video games, and AI simulations.
Can you tell us about your artistic journey? Where did it start, and how did it evolve?
It goes back to my childhood. My father was part of the first generation of Chinese contemporary artists involved in the 1985 New Wave movement and participated in one of the major contemporary art shows in 1989. Because of this, I initially wanted to major in art history and enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. But after six months, I realized it wasn’t the right fit. I didn’t enjoy the program, so I left and moved to Florence, Italy, to study traditional oil painting. Like many young artists, I dreamed of being Michelangelo and wanted to see the old masterworks in person. I learned all traditional painting methods, from glazing to oil restoration to marble sculpture, and so on.
Four years later, I moved to the US and did my MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. While I began exploring more contemporary painting there, I also started taking digital art classes, which became a turning point for me.
Eventually, I realized that time-based media worked better for me than still media. I’m a talkative person, and working in the digital space just made sense. Holding a paintbrush felt heavy, perhaps because of the weight of art history, and my own studying experience. So I started experimenting with animation, performance, and interactive media.
There’s a consistent thread in your practice exploring the impact of technology on our lives. One of your works, A Woman with the Technology, really embodies this. Can you tell us more about that piece?
A Woman with the Technology was created in 2019. It involved a 100-day process of manually collecting all the data related to my daily digital experience from YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. I spent 6 to 8 hours a day doing this, while observing how the information fed to me evolved over time.
The project was driven by my personal experiences and readings about algorithm control, filter bubbles, and algorithmic bias. I had been living in the US for about five or six years at that point and began wondering what ideologies I was being influenced by, especially as someone living in a “blue bubble.” I never really interacted with the other side, only learning about it through the news.
Eventually, I trained a chatbot using a recurrent neural network (an older AI model) on the data I had collected. I created an AI version of myself and began conversing with it. Over time, far-left and far-right content started surfacing, both within the platform and across my social media. Through our conversations, we co-wrote a script, including the title, which became a ten-minute animation. The project wasn’t just about algorithmic control and bias; it was also about the coexistence—and even tension—between me and this AI version. Confronting my digital self felt like a glimpse into the future, one that has already arrived.
Let’s shift to the theme of world-building. One project that really dives into this is Event Modeling. Can you talk a little bit about that particular project?
Event Modeling was created with my longtime collaborator Mark Ramos, who is also a digital artist. It started when we discovered a tool that could generate 3D models from text. As someone who works extensively with 3D animation, I was like, “Oh, I finally don’t have to do 3D modeling anymore.”
Of course, that was an exaggeration. The tool, developed nearly three years ago, was relatively crude and not as sophisticated as the tools we see currently. The models generated looked like distorted stones, almost like fossils. That got us thinking: what if, in the future, only silicon-based life survives and tries to interpret human history through these AI-generated fossils? What would they misunderstand? What would they get wrong? That elasticity was exactly something we really wanted to explore and document.
We built a dataset of these AI-generated “fossils,” using prompts based on current events and culturally specific references. We then placed them in a virtual world to be experienced through VR headsets, where users could walk around, interact with the objects, and view the data they were based on.
Your latest project, Agartha, also looks incredibly immersive. Can you tell us about it?
Agartha was commissioned by the Pinchuk Art Centre as part of the Future Generation Art Prize. It includes a 15-minute video, two digital paintings, a puzzle video game, and a short AI-generated film. The work examines different modes of connection between species, ranging from plants to animals to humans to silicon-based forms. It looks at the specificities within each of these and how we can learn from them. It blends media archaeology, documentary materials, field investigations, and science fiction. I was influenced by thinkers like Bruno Latour, Matthew Fuller, Timothy Morton, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
The narrative is based on the myth of Agartha. According to ancient Indian texts, Agartha passes through the depths of the Atlantic, connecting the continents of Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. It is said to have secret exits in Mexico, Turkey, China, India, Spain, and other locations. When I came across this story, it felt like the perfect vehicle to explore a complex narrative I’ve always wanted to tell. That’s the first layer of the work.
The second layer involves specific examples of these connections, like the “Wood Wide Web,” a term proposed by scientist Suzanne Simard. She was examining, for example, a dying Himalayan fir tree transfers 40% of its nutrients and carbon to the tree next to it. The work then moves into more human-related systems of connection—from geopolitics to the One Belt One Road Initiative, to massive infrastructure building and political frameworks. Another key topic is the idea of alternative networks. Here, I reference a concept by Helga Tawil-Souri called the “Internet Pigeon Network” in Gaza. It’s an alternative internet infrastructure using homing pigeons, replacing electricity and data-based AI with what she calls “bio-intelligence.”
As we’re talking, it strikes me that so much of your work is about connection across time, species, and systems. At the heart of it, it seems deeply human.
Yes, I think so. That’s the core theme that underlines my practice. Even though I work as a digital artist, I see that the way I work often feels more like that of a curator, not curating exhibitions per se, but curating relationships, events, and systems.
My projects often explore alternative systems or what I call “eternities networks.” I often find myself questioning, compared to acceleration, speed, or transparency; Is there a space for opacity or intimacy? How do we build that into our forms of connection?
Some of the work I do isn’t necessarily art in a traditional sense, but is more social or community-based. For example, many of my artist friends in China have been impacted by the shifting art market and the collapsing real estate market. Because of those changes, we’re seeing more and more grassroots initiatives forming—not formal institutions, but local communities and artist-run groups. These are people spending more time together, sharing resources, and supporting one another. It’s almost like what I experienced in New York. In Hangzhou, there’s this growing grassroots energy that feels really vital.
