worlds
INNER CARBONMAMMOTH TECHNOLOGYPRIMORDIUM
objects
InformationExhibitions
WritingsSpeaking
Interviews
Circuit of Life
Photolithography on copper plate, patina
4 x 6 inch
2026
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.
Exploring the psyche of a fictional Daoist in a Paris lab, it examines the East-West clash of epistemic visuality, and envisions an alternative to techno-Orientalism: a harmonious union of knowledge integrating Daoist metaphysics. Using game engine, 3D modeling and AI, Yan transmutes historical images and lost ideas, giving voice to “ghosts” and “orphans” of the Enlightenment.
Below are scenes from DWP in the sequential order of their appearance, with reference images and texts.
Commissioned by the 6th VH Award, Hyundai Motor Group
Dream of Walnut Palaces
Film
10 m
Director, Writer - Wendi Yan
3D Models - Wendi Yan
Environment Design - Wendi Yan
Animation - Wendi Yan
Skeleton Ghost Character Design, Modeling, Texturing - Haoyue Xu, Zeming Sun
Music Composition - Dasychira
Sound Design - Dasychira
Editing - Wendi Yan
Commissioned by the 6th VH Award, Hyundai Motor Group.
At once an attempt to reflect a possible psyche rooted in historical research, and an effort in turning the narrative upside down, Dream of the Walnut Palaces takes the symbols characteristic of the time period and subverts them: the imperial ship sailing westward carries gifts of Chinese medicinal knowledge; the ship’s sails are made with ornamental laces and printed with Chinese medical illustrations; the magic lantern plays
In her history research, Yan excavated details from secret scientific experiments in Qing China to magic lantern shows in Antoine Lavoisier’s Arsenal, in order to explore the psyche of an individual that didn’t exist, but she wished he did. What if, during the Age of Revolution, a Daoist master brought his wisdom to the Enlightenment scientists that were establishing the rules and orders for the emerging modern science?
Yan turns archival images into 3D models using AI, re-enacts historical illustrations with newly designed character models, and redesigns critical instruments from the time period. The film becomes a speculative historical study of epistemic visuality between China and Europe.
Utilizing the rhetoric of dreams, ghosts and shadows --- strong motifs that emerged from Yan’s history research, this film gives voice to the real ghosts of the Enlightenment: correlational thinking and embodied knowledge, which characterize not only Daoism, but many schools of thoughts and practice around the world now deemed to be “pseudoscience.” In this process of vocalization, Yan asks, what forms of knowledge have gotten lost in the project of modernizing, professionalizing, and standardizing science as we have done? Could a different modernity of knowledge-making have been possible?
Exhibitions/Screenings
2026
Turku Art Museum, Turku
Slipstream, Arebyte Digital Art Centre, London
Flesh and Bone, ArtScience Museum, Singapore
Diffrakt, Berlin
Singapore Art Week
2025
The 8th International Intermedia Festival, TANK Art Center, Shanghai
Berlin Art Week Special Screening with Videoart at Midnight, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
Lightsout Lightson, Stiftung St Matthaus, Berlin
Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
Hyundai Motorstudio, Beijing
HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel
BTS ARCHIVE