Landscapes: Illusions in Flux

山水·虚实幻变

2025

3D-printed resin, steel,

10-channel videos with sound, 1 hour

Commissioned by Mousa Art & Tech for exhibition “Resonance—Hebei Imagination” Digital Cultural Heritage Exhibition at Hebei Museum, Shijiazhuang 由穆萨艺术科技委托，为石家庄河北博物院“共鸣·河博幻象” 数字艺术快闪展创作

This installation takes the Western Han dynasty gilt-bronze Boshan Censer as its starting point, using AI to reimagine the object across shifting historical periods, cultural contexts, and aesthetic systems. The original palm-sized incense vessel is transformed into a life-sized, horizontally expanded display structure that evokes mountain landscape, drifting cloud, and unfamiliar organism.

Embeded within ten cave-like recesses, screens display one thousand AI-generated morphing variations of the Boshan Censer. Its identity dissolves through continuous transformation—at times retaining recognizable features, at times shifting entirely into other objects, architecture, living creatures, or unidentifiable alien forms. Styled like aged photographs and synchronized with light ambient sound, the animations create an immersive experience of temporal collapse and fluid meaning.

Referencing the concept of yan yun (smoke and cloud) as nature’s way of calculating time through ephemeral movement, the work is a performance of impermanance and cultural projection that reflects on design’s authorship and uniqueness in the age of AI and the museum’s role in encoding and framing meaning. Visitors encounter not a fixed relic, but a mystic computational organism and a vessel of unknowable logic that contains and releases as-yet-unnamed shapes and emotions from the vast universe.

本作品以西汉错金铜博山炉为起点，借助人工智能在不同时代、文化语境与审美系统中对这一器物进行生成式重构。原本手掌大小的熏香炉被3D打印为等身高的横向展示柜，形态既像烟云和山水画卷，又好似不断生长的陌生生命体。

结构内部设有十个洞穴，每个洞中嵌有一块与博山炉原尺寸相同的屏幕，循环播放由AI生成的一千种变体动画。博山炉的身份在不断的变形中消解——有时保留着可识别的特征，有时则完全转变为其他物件、建筑、生物，甚至是无法辨认的异形。这些视觉效果以老照片的风格呈现，并与灯光和音乐同步，唤起了一种时间的坍塌感和语义的流动性。

作品借鉴“烟云”的概念，即自然界通过瞬息万变的运动来计算时间的方式，是对无常和文化投射的演绎，反思了设计在人工智能时代的原创性和独特性，以及博物馆在编码和构建意义方面所扮演的角色。观者所见，并非一件固定的文物，而是一个神秘的计算有机体，一个蕴含着不可知逻辑的容器，它容纳并释放着浩瀚宇宙中尚未被命名的形象与情绪。