On Some Faraway Shore No.2, 2025. Scanned collage and acrylic gouache on canvas, 145 × 112.4 cm.
On Some Faraway Shore at first appears like a strange, unfamiliar landscape, yet upon closer approach it reveals itself as an intricate arrangement of digital fragments, displayed with the precision of an anatomical collection. The artist summons, through contemporary algorithms, the method of the seventeenth-century anatomist Frederik Ruysch, who transformed human specimens into glass-encased gardens adorned with pearls, lace, and artificial flowers. Just as Ruysch injected red carmine and blue indigo into capillaries and decorated fetal skeletons with lace and blossoms to stage a “Still Life,” this work disassembles and collages AI-collected and generated ecological photographs, mineral textures, cellular cross-sections, organ images, and the radial patterns of the iris.
If Ruysch stained blood vessels with carmine and indigo, here the canvas becomes suffused with baroque abundance—magenta, pink, jade, turquoise, and gold entwined—embodying an anxious fragmentation within its opulence. The surface resembles natural scenery yet depicts a landscape that could never exist: a tableau of “dyed data.” Mountain ridges dissolve into snowy peaks, tropical plants sprout between polar ice, and life and death, memory and oblivion, nature and technology strike a curious balance within a single frame. Viewers are left to endlessly ask themselves whether what they behold is a landscape or a specimen.
This digital-age Wunderkammer—a “cabinet of AI curiosities constructed from data”—renders the transience of life, memory, and landscape in dazzling hues. Here, between the cosmos glimpsed in the eye’s iris and the vanishing distance of a faraway shore, we witness vanitas in its most contemporary form: the fleeting moment of the “present.” Beneath the dazzling surface lurk fissures and signs of dissolution: cracked strata, withering vegetation, pigments bleeding into one another. Somewhere within this multilayered shore—dyed, fractured, proliferating—our gaze confronts the unresolved question: is this scene alive, dead, or lingering in the in-between? From Ruysch’s cabinet to the canvas of the AI era, it resonates as the most modern expression of vanitas.
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2)
No.4
No.6
On Some Faraway Shore No.4, No.6, 2025.
Scanned collage and acrylic gouache on canvas, 145 × 112.4 cm.
On Some Faraway Shore No.1, 2025.
Scanned collage and acrylic gouache on canvas, 117 × 90.7 cm.
No.3
No.5
No.7
On Some Faraway Shore No.3, No.5, No.7, 2025.
Scanned collage and acrylic gouache on canvas, 117 × 90.7cm.
Photography by BB&M Gallery.