An Inquiry into the Moulding of the Body from Clay
11 - 29 July 2026, ACO Art Space, Hong Kong
Joint presentation with Gukzik Lau
An Inquiry into the Moulding of the Body from Clay — Body, Nature, and Inner Geography
My practice has long taken the machine, Shan Shui, and their technological extensions as a phenomenological mode of artistic research. Through digital media, artificial intelligence, and computational manipulation, I explore how machine intelligence may offer another perspective from which we observe, perceive, and understand the world.
The works continue from my previous artistic research into phenomenology and Shan Shui art, particularly the question of how landscape is no longer only an external image to be viewed, but also a perceptual field shaped through the interaction between body, mind, machine, and environment. If traditional Shan Shui painting invites the viewer to wander through an imagined landscape, my digital and AI-based works ask how such wandering may be transformed when perception is mediated by algorithms, datasets, interfaces, and machine vision.
Learning Shan Shui, Generating Feng Shui (觀山讀水，風生水成) develops this inquiry through a mixed media installation and book. The work investigates how artificial intelligence learns visual and philosophical structures from Shan Shui and Feng Shui, and how machine creativity may generate new forms of landscape imagination. Alongside the artwork, the book Gardening of Soul: Conclusion, published by the Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, is presented to share my research paper on this project. It offers the audience a deeper understanding of the artistic process, conceptual rationale, and AI mechanisms involved in generating the work.
The digital prints Extraction Series (萃取系列) and Extraction Series 2 (萃取系列 2), as well as the mixed-media installations Eastern Waterfall Extracting Machine (東方流水萃取機) and Selection Logic (選擇邏輯), were included. These works extend the ongoing exploration of machine perception and digital Shan Shui. While my previous works often emphasised moving images, generative processes, and dynamic computational transformation, the inclusion of prints marks a return from the dynamic to the static. This shift is not a retreat from digitality, but a form of contemplation: an attempt to pause the machine-generated flow and examine the image as a residue, an imprint, or a sediment of algorithmic perception.
Within the context of the artistic dialogue with Gukzik Lau and my research project, An Inquiry into the Moulding of the Body from Clay, these works respond to the reflection on body, nature, and inner geography. If the body may be understood as a landscape formed from clay, memory, sensation, and breath, then the machine-generated Shan Shui becomes another kind of inner terrain — one shaped by data, computation, and non-human perception. Through digital extraction and reconstruction, the landscape is no longer merely represented; it is sensed, processed, and reimagined through a machine’s way of seeing.
My works therefore propose a dialogue between ancient landscape thought and contemporary machine intelligence. They consider how Shan Shui may be re-entered through digital media, not as a nostalgic return to tradition, but as an expanded field of perception. In this field, the human eye, the machine’s vision, and the body’s inner geography intersect, forming a new contemplative space in which nature, technology, and consciousness continue to unfold.
