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Luo Ping’s Ghost Amusement Arcade
2026
Generative video system, color, sound; variable duration
The Qing-dynasty painter Luo Ping surveyed images broadly to paint the series Ghost Amusement Scroll. Among its wide-ranging depictions of ghosts, a pair appeared closely resembling the anatomical drawings of the Renaissance physician Andreas Vesalius. Luo Ping may have seen them in a copy of the Yuanxi renshen tushuo (c. 1630), a Chinese translation of European anatomy by the Jesuit missionary Jacobus Rho and his colleagues, which reproduces the same skeletons. As the drawings made their way from Basel to Beijing over two centuries, their original goal of representing the human skeleton became a playful imagination of ghostly daily lives.
Staging this image mistranslation as a game of pose matching, Luo Ping’s Arcade brings back the skeleton automaton narrator from Yan’s film Dream of Walnut Palaces (2025), now as a player inside the manuscript. On the facing page appears a figure from Vesalius’s plates or the acupuncture-channel figures of Hua Shou’s Shisi jing fahui (1341), in a 1716 Edo edition. The ornamental skeleton studies the page and attempts to match his pose with the composition of the facing page. He switches between two distinct modes of depicting the human body, which, as Shigehisa Kuriyama argued in The Expressiveness of the Body, illustrate the divergent ways of seeing that undergird the Greek and Chinese lineages of medicine. Visually inspired by East Asian rhythm games of the 2000s, this playful revelation of images of knowledge focuses not on what was lost, but on what is created in the inevitable misinterpretations between epistemic cultures.
Luo Ping’s Arcade is a generative video system with variable lengths of presentation. Combining hand-posed 3D models with layers of AI image and video generation, Yan composed a system that can alternate sequences and join new images of the body: the game is infinite, the skeleton forever matching up to imaginations of the human body.