Animals Shanshui
Inkjet print mounted on wood panel 60*90cm,
floating structure with subtle angle
This work comes from my experience of the contemporary algorithmic image world. It works as a kind of recall of a familiar visual language, rather than something entirely new. I am thinking of the animal images we constantly encounter in our daily digital environments—cute, soft, furry, endlessly circulating online, performing behaviors that exceed logic and blur the boundary between reality and fiction. Even when clearly synthetic, they still trigger real emotions and remain deeply lovable. Perhaps within the chaos of contemporary society, they soothe repressed feelings and comfort something fractured inside us. It is a form of tenderness—but fictional, and potentially dangerous.
Starting from this observation, I began to work with these circulating animal images. In the process, I gradually became aware of the extent to which human emotions are projected onto them. When we look at these animals, we are in a way looking at ourselves, encountering hidden vulnerabilities and a desire to search for new paths.
In the past ancient China, due to technological limitations, people could only imagine and understand the world through painting, especially when it came to non-human species. Painting and texts such as Shanhai jing, Bowuzhi, Shoupu and various bestiaries already show how collective imagination and emotional projection played a central role. When I look at those visual and textual representations of mythical or exotic creatures, I recognize a similar mechanism to what we see today. It is a kind of return, but with a different medium, one that allows for a ghost-like reactivation.
I attempt to bring these two temporal contexts into dialogue. As a contemporary image-maker who has learned to use new generative tools, I am interested in how this historical continuity can be presented and reinterpreted. The work became both a reflection of my cultural memory and a response to my current cultural experience.
The beginning is intuitive and experimental. As an artist, I move back and forth between control and loss of control, and at times finding myself surprised by the images that emerge. These animal images, reconstructed through the combination of human emotion and technological systems, take on a form of existence that exceeds the real. They remain somewhere between cuteness and eeriness, humor and unease.
In the end, the project Animal Shanshui consists of four large-scale, high-resolution and dense composite images. Realistically rendered animals are placed within landscape spaces shaped by the aesthetics of classical Chinese painting. When viewed as large-format prints, a certain strangeness appears in the details.The red halation surrounding the animal carries both dangerous and seductive. It is wholesome, but also feels an undercurrent of anxiety.