3×3 Birds Seminar

3×3 Birds Seminar

2022-05 / How many futures fit inside a broken timeline? / 有多少种未来藏在断裂的时间线里?

2022-06 / Can a sensor remember like a body does? / 感应器能像身体一样记忆吗?

2022-07 / Who owns the ghost in the digital archive? / 谁拥有数字档案中的幽灵?

2022-08 / What if we think with humidity instead of logic? / 如果我们以湿度思考而非逻辑,会发生什么?

2022-09 / Is coding a new form of spell-casting? / 编程是一种新型咒术吗?

2022-10 / When language dissolves, does power evaporate? / 当语言溶解,权力是否蒸发?

2022-11 / Do machines dream in broken grammars? / 机器是否用破碎语法做梦?

2022-12 / Can we unlearn the anthropocene? / 我们能否解除人类世的学习?

2023-01 / If syntax collapses, what shapes thought? / 若句法崩塌,思想由何构成?

2023-02 / Can we touch without borders? / 我们能否在无边界中触碰?

2023-03 / Is speculation the new epistemology? / “投机”是新的知识论吗?

2023-04 / Who listens when the Earth whispers? / 当地球低语,谁在倾听?

2023-05 / Can intimacy survive platform logic? / 亲密关系能否在平台逻辑下存活?

2023-06 / Is the glitch a site of refusal? / 故障是一种拒绝的场域吗?

2023-07 / What do artificial feelings teach us about control? / 人工情感教会我们什么控制逻辑?

2023-08 / Can decolonial aesthetics deprogram AI? / 去殖民美学能否解除 AI 的预设?

2023-09 / Where do myths go when they're digitized? / 神话被数字化后去了哪里?

2023-10 / Is the body still political in a pixelated world? / 在像素化世界中,身体仍是政治的吗?

2023-11 / How does silence function in automated systems? / 沉默在自动化系统中如何运作?

2023-12 / Can memory be disobedient? / 记忆可以反抗吗?

2024-01 / Is the archive a territory of desire? / 档案是欲望的疆域吗?

2024-02 / When the map melts, does the land remember us? / 当地图融化,大地是否记得我们?

2024-03 / Can fiction break the infrastructure? / 虚构能否破坏基础设施?

2024-04 / What is sacred in synthetic rituals? / 合成仪式中,什么是神圣的?

2024-05 / Do algorithms mourn what they forget? / 算法会为被遗忘的事物哀悼吗?

2024-06 / What does opacity protect in digital life? / 数字生活中的“晦暗”保护了什么?

2024-07 / Do algorithms dream of wet rituals? / 算法会梦见潮湿的仪式吗?

2024-08 / Where does the body end in augmented space? / 在增强空间中,身体的边界在哪里?

2024-09 / If the sensor lies, what else can we trust? / 若感应器撒谎,我们还能相信什么?

2024-10 / Is attention a finite ecology? / 注意力是一种有限生态吗?

2024-11 / Can data decay be fertile? / 数据的腐烂是否能成为滋养?

2024-12 / What kinds of silence do images make? / 图像制造了哪些种类的沉默?

2025-01 / Is the planetary also personal? / 宇宙尺度的是否也关乎个体?

2025-02 / Can posthuman intimacy survive without touch? / 后人类的亲密能否在无触碰中存活?

2025-03 / If emotion is a system, can we hack it? / 如果情感是系统,我们能否黑入它?

2025-04 / Are you the ghost in someone else’s neural network? / 你是否是他人神经网络中的幽灵?

2025-05 / Is the womb still political in artificial reproduction? / 在人工繁殖中,子宫依然是政治的吗?

Partial List of Speaking Artists

  • Yvette Yujie Yang’s practice explores the growing disconnection between humanity and nature in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, and the anxious longing for renewed symbiosis. Working across fine art, photography, and glass, her multidisciplinaryapproach acts as a living memory archive, preserving fleeting moments and intricate emotions that might otherwise dissipate in the continuum of daily experience. Informed by a multicultural perspective, the artist constructs a symbolic worlds that reflect ecological unease while grounding them in intimate personal resonance.

  • Jiayi Yu (Yujia Yi, Xiaoyu) is an artist born in Shenzhen, China, and currently based in London. Her practice centers on experimental digital scanning as a medium, through which she explores the sensory overlaps between touch and vision—particularly within the context of Asian LGBTQ+ experiences.

    She studied at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and London College of Communication (LCC), where she developed a unique approach to scanning technologies as a way of investigating embodied perception and emotional resonance. Her work has been widely exhibited in London, including at Tate Modern, and demonstrates how digital media can be transformed into an intimate and affective channel connecting bodily presence and emotional echoes.

  • Baiting Qi is a contemporary art practitioner based between Beijing and London. Her practice focuses primarily on narrative objects and installations, aiming to bridge the rupture between fragmented everyday experiences and the flow of subjective consciousness. Through dialogues between objects and spatial arrangements, she invites viewers to re-perceive the passage of time and the hidden rhythms of the world.

    She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art, UK. Her works have been exhibited at Tate Modern in London, the Arsenale in Venice, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and the Phoenix Center in Beijing.

  • Redjade Yuan Zhang
    Born in 1990 in Beijing, Redjade Yuan Zhang is an artist living and working between China and the UK. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and a BA (Hons) in Sculpture and Environmental Art from the Glasgow School of Art. She is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA).

    Her accolades include the Future Map Award from University of the Arts London (2013) and the Best Degree Show Work Award from the Royal Scottish Academy (2012).

    Her work was featured on the cover of the Herald magazine during the 151st Annual Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy, with portrait photography by award-winning photographer Alistair Devine and an article written by senior journalist Heather McLeod.

  • David Lane is a British artist currently based between the UK and China. He holds a PhD from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing and is currently pursuing a second PhD in Contemporary Art and Education at the University of Edinburgh. He also holds an MA in Education from the University of Derby and an MA in Contemporary Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

    As a selected artist of New Contemporaries, David Lane stands out for his sustained and evolving observational approach. He integrates methods drawn from journalism, philosophy, sociology, and psychology into his artistic practice, uncovering and systematizing the hidden logic beneath surface phenomena. His work has been collected by major institutions, including Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery in London.

  • Greg Kreiman (Gelong) is an interdisciplinary professional with a unique background spanning art, technology, and education. He currently lives and works between Beijing, China, and Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia.

    In 2008, he founded his own gallery, CCD300, in Beijing. He is now active as a contemporary artist and educator. Greg holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and Philosophy from Webster University Geneva, Switzerland, and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Studies and Fine Arts from Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

    Fluent in multiple programming languages and English, Greg has also spent many years immersed in Chinese language and culture, including the study of traditional Chinese calligraphy and ink painting. His artistic practice focuses on merging digital creativity with traditional forms, and his work has been exhibited internationally.

    As an educator, he brings his diverse skill set to teaching creative coding and generative art in both Serbia and China, aiming to inspire and expand the boundaries between art and science.

  • Xi Luo is a painter specializing in oil painting. Born in Tangshan, Hebei, China in 1994, he moved with his parents to Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1999. In 2012, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Johanson Art School and entered the studio of Hamid Savkuev at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied easel painting. He received his Master’s degree in 2018 and completed a PhD in Art History at the Repin Academy in 2022.

    His early relocation from China to Russia has had a profound impact on both his life and artistic practice. Although he has spent most of his life in Russia, he often feels like a foreigner there—just as he does when in China. This experience of living between two cultures forms the basis for his exploration of identity, allowing Eastern and Western visual symbols to coexist in his work.

    Xi Luo sees his art as a way to detach from reality and confront his personal existential crisis. The figures in his paintings are often stripped of individual characteristics but are filled with emotional intensity. In some works, groups of people appear as collectives expressing a shared emotion, reflecting the absurdity of the search for meaning in life.

    He uses the painting techniques he has mastered as tools to express his ideas and perspectives. Most of his major works are large-scale oil paintings on canvas, while smaller works serve as daily sketches that quickly capture his feelings in the moment. Sometimes, these smaller pieces evolve into full-scale series or independent art projects.

    He does not seek to be constrained by specific artistic methods, nor does he feel the need to constantly invent new techniques. For him, the most important thing is to maintain a recognizable and consistent artistic language, regardless of the tools or materials used.

  • Yang Zhen uses painting to document his experiences, observations, and learning. Working primarily with oil and tempera, he often erases parts of the image with deliberate precision—not only to convey the fading of memory, but also to reflect the transient nature of images themselves. This sense of incompleteness invites a shared awareness of impermanence and lends authenticity to his work. By emphasizing poetic elements and embracing uncertainty, Yang explores how painting can serve as a means of searching for memory and evoking resonance with collective experiences.

  • Wang Quetu
    Born in 1981 in Yueyang, Hunan Province, Wang Quetu graduated from the Printmaking Department of Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. He currently lives and works in Songzhuang, Beijing.

    Wang describes himself as someone driven by a humble yet persistent desire to understand the world. "I am a fortunate person," he says. "Within the limits of my own perception, I seek to know what this world is, what it looks like. When I form an idea, I carry it with me as I face the world. But the world is ultimately unknowable, and so what I often encounter are unexpected surprises. I approach this pursuit with humility. The world may be uncertain—but the one thing I am certain of is that I must do this. So I simply do it."

  • Shuqin Huang is a theatre director and interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BA from Chelsea College of Arts and an MA from Central Saint Martins, both part of the University of the Arts London.

    Huang’s practice spans multiple media, including installation, performance, and theatre. Her work investigates feminist and posthumanist perspectives, often oscillating between reality and fiction. Currently, she is focused on the normalized, invisible forms of violence experienced by women in different cultural contexts, particularly within social structures and intimate relationships.

    Her work frequently incorporates fabric, woven installations, and embodied movement, using the body as a medium to create immersive and interactive experiences.

  • Tang Lan graduated with a BA in Digital Performance from the Shanghai Institute of Design, China Academy of Art in June 2021. In January 2023, she completed her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, with First Class Honours. She is currently teaching in the Department of Intermedia Art at Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts.

    Tang’s practice spans across media, including sound, installation, theatre, and painting. Her work draws from natural science, philosophical thought, and psychoanalytic theory to construct a channel between the material and the spiritual worlds. She is currently focused on sound-based art, exploring sound ontology and investigating the morphology of sound, spatiality within sound, theatre within sound, and sound within theatre.

    Her works often take place in site-specific contexts, emphasizing the relationship between space, audience, and artwork through ritualistic structures. She is particularly interested in the concept of total theatre and seeks to blur the boundaries between installation and theatrical performance. As part of her ongoing research into sound, she also composes for theatre and collaborates with both domestic and international productions.

  • Corbin Ferguson’s work is rooted in the traditions of observational and gestural painting, conceptually resonating with body-based performance art. Within the framework of mainstream American culture, he draws a melancholic metaphor between everyday life and art history—one that obliquely and eerily reflects both the artist and his model.

    As a form of artistic intervention into identity construction, Ferguson objectifies himself in the dual roles of artist and model. His philosophical play and visual practice explore masculinity, misogyny, and the broader structures of individualism.

  • Chi Hui’s work often reflects the emotional complexity of human relationships and the intricate web of interdependence between individuals. Viewers are invited into a world of tension, warmth, and conflict—where emotions unfold with subtle intensity.

    Her practice is not merely an artistic expression, but a sustained exploration of emotional experience, prompting reflection on the nature of intimacy in all its forms: friendship, family, romantic love, and everyday human connection. Through her work, Chi encourages audiences to contemplate the emotional dynamics that shape our lives—capturing the full spectrum of intimacy, from affection to contradiction, dependence to autonomy, and revealing the many-sided nature of close relationships.

  • In Liu Yuxuan’s work, her compelling paintings present a reconstruction and reimagination of symbols. By challenging the conventional meanings and boundaries of symbolic forms, she invites viewers to reconsider the diversity and fluidity of signs.

    Her painting practice provokes deeper reflection on how everyday objects function as symbols and language—revealing how they shape and redefine our ways of thinking and communicating across different cultural and social contexts.

    Liu Yuxuan’s work reveals the limitless possibilities of symbolic forms, demonstrating how art can transcend traditional boundaries through the reconfiguration and reinvention of symbols, offering entirely new visual and intellectual experiences.

  • In Xing Yanchao’s paintings, symbols drawn from diverse cultures and contexts are intricately woven together to create visually striking experiences. His work not only reflects the dynamics of cultural exchange in a globalized era, but also explores how cross-cultural symbols are redefined and transformed within new environments.

  • Yue Ting received her Master’s degree from Columbia University in New York in 2023 and her Bachelor’s degree from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden in 2018.

    Yue Ting’s work offers a unique perspective that invites us to re-evaluate the identities we are assigned—those we accept as given. To understand her work is to engage with the global crisis of identity, where traditional geographic boundaries can no longer adequately define one’s sense of cultural belonging. On one hand, this collapse opens up the possibility for self-redefinition; on the other, it reveals unresolved cultural differences and the persistent gaze of the "other." Between these forces lies a search for belonging—one that seeks both inclusion and recognition.

    Her video-based works reflect not only the internal conflicts shaped by her own complex upbringing, but also urge the viewer to reconsider how identity and belonging are constructed—for themselves and for others.

  • Zhuang Qi (b. 1999) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and animator working between China and the UK. She holds an MA in Experimental Animation from the Royal College of Art (2020–2023), and a BA in Illustration Animation from Kingston University (2017–2020).

    Her practice spans 2D/3D animation, live-action video, performance, and installation, navigating the space between reality and dream. Qi’s works have been exhibited internationally in Russia, Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Spain, and China.

    As a researcher, her autobiographical essay The World, the Symbol, the Gaze is archived at the RCA Library. Her inquiries range from Buddhist cosmology and abstract conceptions of the universe, to scientific experiments in asexual reproduction, and her own intimate experiences as a lesbian woman.

    In her ongoing research, she continues to deconstruct the dualisms presented in The World, the Symbol, the Gaze, examining the ontology of cinema and the exploration of the body and body-based materials.

  • Zhang Yunqi (b. 1997) is a visual artist based in London. She holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art (2021–2023), and a BFA in Photography from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, China (2016–2020).

    Her practice engages with themes of mystical narrative, psychoanalysis, and speculative theory. Most recently, Yunqi’s work continues to explore the complex entanglement between humans and machines, the shifting states of perception and consciousness, and the intersection of technology, science, spirituality, and art history.

    Working across installation, sculpture, video, performance, archives, and image-making, she questions the very necessity of photography in the age of artificial intelligence.

  • Wang Yuxiao (b. 1995) is an artist currently living and working in Shanghai. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art in London (2021–2023) and her BA from the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, China (2014–2018).

    Wang Yuxiao’s practice explores the continuity of relationships through the lens of the subconscious and poetic memory, expressing acts of interdependence and parasitic entanglement. In her work, hardened seashells become vessels for fragmented subconscious states—each an individual entity, yet deeply interwoven through intricate, parasitic connections.

    Her spatial constructions are often shaped by the constraints of social discourse, reflecting the tension between resistance and conformity. Figures within her narratives think, wander, and express—but remain trapped in their existential condition. For Wang, “the relationship between life forms and the external world is the most fascinating. As higher animals, humans also carry animal instincts. These instincts reveal both physical and psychological vulnerabilities—innate or acquired—and accepting them has been part of my own process of self-understanding.”

    Driven by a primal urge for intimacy, humans expose their fragility, grow through dependence, and are shaped, healed, and transformed by the relationships they inhabit. In her view, this dynamic is not just personal, but an inevitable fate of living within a social world.

  • Ziwei Gong (b. 1998, Changde, Hunan) is an artist based between China and the UK. She received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2019–2021), and her BA from Beijing Normal University (2015–2019).

    Humor plays a central role in Gong’s practice. After working with cartoon figures for a period, she began to find humor within abstract shapes themselves—forms that evoked a tactile impulse, a desire to squeeze or touch. Driven by this bodily curiosity, she created works that express the physical urge to grasp or hold certain objects.

    Gong’s work consistently explores the relationship between the body, objects, and space. Recently, she has been experimenting with combining fabric collage and painting to depict interactions between figures and various everyday domestic environments.

  • Yiru Chen is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, and educator for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Born in Shanghai, she holds an MA in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College (2021), and a BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (2019).

    Yiru is known for her poetic visual language and multimedia practice. Her experience both behind and in front of the camera has shaped a unique personal aesthetic. Her work delves deeply into questions of identity and the emotional undercurrents of everyday life.

    Her graduation short film Xiaqing was selected by over 20 international film festivals, including the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, and won several awards, including the Jury Prize at the Shanghai Queer Film Festival. She has served as Artistic Director Assistant at HERE Arts Center in New York and worked as a personal assistant to American documentary filmmaker Stephanie Black.

    Her collaborative documentary No Rules is Our Rule, co-created with Japanese performance artist Eiko Otake and Chinese dancer-director Wen Hui, was awarded Best Feature Documentary at the Japan International Film Festival and had its New York premiere at Asia Society in December 2023.

  • Chen Yuezhu (b. 1993) is a painter currently living and working in Beijing. She received her MA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2019–2021), and her BA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (2013–2017).

    Chen Yuezhu’s practice is primarily rooted in painting, with a focus on themes such as psychology, mysticism, and gender. Since 2017, the pursuit of a new visual language has become central to her artistic process. Influenced by Gestalt psychology, she blends abstraction with figuration, investigating the subtle interplay between foreground and background. Dreams and meditation play a vital role in shaping her creative process. Through compositional structure and visual narrative, she seeks to evoke a metaphysical force within her work.

  • Chenyu Zhao creates sound installations and moving image works that map the fractures between linguistic memory and geographic displacement. His practice is rooted in continuous remapping—of identity, emotion, and space—through fleeting auditory traces and visual echoes.

  • Ke Lin constructs speculative systems where mysticism meets digital technology. Her installations and generative images form a kind of "digital metaphysics," questioning how fate, systems, and embodiment are entangled in contemporary belief structures.

  • Yifei Tang explores the emotional residue of objects through animation and drawing. His work evokes a melancholic humor, where inanimate forms reveal psychological states—small things feel too much, silently collapsing under memory’s weight.

  • Rui Jiang works with motion capture and interactive systems to explore the body as a site of resistance within algorithmic control. She codes choreography, transforming movement into speculative language against surveillance culture.

  • Haoran Gao builds dream-generation systems using AI imagery, neural data, and unconscious narratives. His work treats dreams not as mysteries but as precisely constructed diagrams—coded sites where technology meets the psyche.

  • Xiaoyue Wang weaves sound into tactile forms. Using textiles, electric threads, and layered recordings, she sculpts environments that can be heard and felt. Her work reimagines listening as a soft, immersive architecture.

  • Yue Hu is a media archaeologist whose installations resurrect obsolete technologies—VHS, CRTs, old hard drives—to expose ghostly layers of time. His work channels media extinction into sonic and visual hauntings.

  • Chen Zhang merges queer comics, graffiti, and handwritten language into chaotic narrative collages. His work celebrates gender fluidity, visual noise, and the joyful disorder of urban bodies refusing categorization.

  • Anran Li works with minimal forms and frozen temporalities. His practice explores emotional coldness, architectural silence, and the slow breakdown of intimacy through spatial delay and affective suspension.

  • Ye Zhou translates urban traffic systems into audiovisual choreography. By mapping sound and rhythm from city infrastructure, he reveals how control, flow, and noise shape the politics of movement.

  • Xin Jiang centers the female body as a site of vulnerability, intimacy, and political narration. Through performance and sculpture, she documents the fragility of relational spaces shaped by desire and fear.

  • Ling Lu works with ephemeral materials—fog, scent, moisture—to explore forms of experience that escape exhibition logic. Her practice embraces ambiguity, slowness, and the edge of perceptibility.

  • Ye Cai codes poetic systems that blur interface and ritual. His work transforms programming languages into speculative scripts—part software, part myth—questioning how control and emotion coexist.

  • Ava Monteiro explores ecological collapse through biodegradable installations and speculative rituals. Her work merges Afro-Brazilian cosmology with materials like earth, water, and fermented fabric, creating slow-tempo environments of mourning and rebirth.

  • Sami Ould Jibril works at the intersection of surveillance aesthetics and personal memory. Using infrared photography, heat maps, and government archive manipulations, he reveals the soft violence embedded in border technologies.

  • Delphine Sokolov makes sculptural video works that simulate broken mythologies and emotional algorithms. Her projects often center on non-verbal grief and the glitch as a performative failure.

  • Niko Halvorsen creates immersive sonic cartographies using field recordings, sonar data, and Arctic wind. His work responds to environmental silence, listening to what melts, disappears, or cannot be mapped.

  • Jae-Min Kim choreographs AI-powered puppetry and generative motion systems. By translating traditional Korean movement vocabularies into machine behavior, he critiques tech-fetishism and lost ancestries.

  • Leila Darwish constructs fictional state archives based on disappeared women in resistance movements. Her work combines embroidery, text, and forensic aesthetics to perform historical recovery and ritual.

  • Owen Maddox creates audio-cinematic installations that reflect on masculinity and suburban dissociation. His work often draws from analog sound devices and home-video formats, evoking a haunted intimacy.

  • Asha Okonjo’s textile-based installations revisit ancestral labor, textile trade, and trauma memory. She uses inherited fabrics and GPS coordinates to embroider forgotten migrations into physical space.

  • Talia Brynner builds conceptual machines that simulate poetic errors. Her kinetic installations operate on the edge of failure, asking what happens when precision is replaced by feeling.

  • Renzo Valdivia reconstructs pre-Columbian cosmologies through virtual landscapes and sonic archaeology. His digital worlds echo with reconstructed sounds, merging indigenous science with speculative ecology.

  • Lior Ben-Meir combines stage design, coding, and talmudic logic to create interactive installations that question divine architecture, looped commandments, and collective exhaustion.

  • Kenza Bouchra’s video works examine how post-colonial silence manifests in domestic gestures. Her work hovers between autobiography and ethnography, often constructed through whispered monologues and half-seen rituals.

  • Sylvain Romuald builds sensorial machines from discarded electronics and personal belongings. His works are part-instrument, part-altar, oscillating between ancestral trance and electrical noise.

  • Imani Cole explores digital mourning and cyber-hauntology. Her glitch portraits and livestream elegies reflect the aesthetics of Black disappearance, ghosting, and survival within algorithmic systems.

  • Haruto Takahashi combines forensic typography, speculative fiction, and computational poetry. His work often takes the form of typographic ruins—fragments of a language not yet spoken.