Individual Work Plans: Physical Works with Artist-and-AI Offspring Imagery & Nocturnal Snapshots
Each study pairs a single mixed-media piece with either image-to-image AI–blended montages (generated exclusively from the artist’s own source material and then further refined by hand) or enlarged iPhone night-scape photographs—or a combination of the two.
These digital elements, realised as mural wallpaper, wall vinyl, or shaped aluminium panels, will be scaled and colour-balanced on site to achieve the most sensitive, site-responsive installation.
*A fuller curatorial overview is provided in the exhibition proposal at the end of this page—please refer to that section for additional context.
Oil and coloured silver/aluminium leaf on debarked kōzo sticks—discarded paper-mulberry cores from traditional washi-making—attached to nine archival paper mounts taken from an early-twentieth-century pictorial folio. Fleeting coloured-pencil marks echo the ageing stains of the paper, conjuring an indeterminate, wall-hung entity that hovers between object, surface, and trace. Stripped of explicit imagery yet carrying a subdued historical weight, the work fuses craft remnants, time-worn material, and ghosted narratives into a single, quietly resonant presence.
Proposed Installation Schemes: Groupings, Wall Treatments & Spatial Interventions
This sketch offers one possible layout idea for arranging the satin sculptures, tailored structures, and multi-screen display in a white-cube gallery space.
Recent Studio Development — Notes for Ying Kwok
Conceptual frame
I’m continuing to work within a porous ontology—a set of conditions where painting, photographic trace, sculptural construction and algorithmic image continually bleed into one another. That porosity mirrors my own position as an “in-between entity—half-alien and half-native,” shaped by formative years in Tokyo, London, and now Onomichi. I’m fully aware that invoking quasi-spirituality can seem a bold—sometimes even faintly nonsensical—thought-experiment; I court that ambiguity deliberately as an atmospheric layer, letting a quiet resonance emerge wherever media overlap or leak.
Wall-based mixed-media surfaces
Former canvases and salvaged chip-board panels (cut from discarded furniture) become restart points rather than endpoints. Onto—and sometimes into—these supports I graft trimmed timber, debarked kōzo sticks, silver/aluminium leaf, photo shards, coloured-pencil smears and slivers of text. The base—fabric, plywood, or composite board—acts like a root stock; each inserted fragment behaves like a scion, fusing into a hybrid anatomy that hovers between drawing, collage and painting. These wall works embody the porous, perpetually revised logic that runs through the entire series.
View images of the physical works used in the mixed-media series
Learn more about the materials behind the physical works
Digital offspring & nocturnal counterpoints
Image-to-image blends in Midjourney recombine fragments of my earlier digital manipulations and abstractions. I then hand-refine the AI output, shaping each ‘offspring’ into a new montaged body that embraces multiple, parallel endpoints rather than a single, fixed conclusion. The ongoing enquiry is whether the fragile, quasi-spiritual charge of the source material can persist through algorithmic alchemy—being preserved, mutated, amplified or twisted. I maintain a reservoir of variants in these states and test them across different configurations; from this pool, I progress the images in which that charge demonstrably persists, hand-refining them further. Others are archived for potential redeployment when context and timing are right, and only those that never carry the charge are discarded.
In parallel I present large-format iPhone night photographs of football pitches, riverbanks and mountain roads around Onomichi. These images are never used as AI input; they sit as independent counterpoints. Flood-lights, car headlamps and smartphone auto-correction create a soft real-world ether that plays against the digital ether of the AI blends. Within the wall pieces themselves, these registers cohere as a four-layer field: material presence; photographic liminality; algorithmic speculation; and the artist’s everyday encounters—tracked across physical and digital timelines—that generate a sense of interconnectedness.
Presentation note: the digital components may be realised as mural wallpaper, wall vinyl, or shaped aluminium panelsand will be scaled and colour-balanced on site for sensitivity to the specific space.
Satin sculptural “commas”
Soft forms first developed for easY mechanisM, Speak Spindle, and Fluxosphere re-emerge as sculptural punctuation. A matched pair of wearable satin pieces is threaded through colour-coated rods with compound moulded edges; suspended, they read as artificial stalactites; set on the floor they behave as totemic markers; they can also be mounted against a wall where a mural drawing or digital wall print becomes a shifting backdrop. Their role is to mediate between tactile presence and digital surface, rhythmically interrupting the image flow.
Optional time-based layer
Meet the Sealion (2022), filmed at VILLA WASAKU (Taishō-era house in Onomichi), is a 13-minute video that interweaves studio objects, historical artefacts and two local photographers cast as mute “gatekeepers”. Twenty-three AI-voiced text fragments—lifted from Twitter debates on feminism and institutional discrimination—overlay dream-like scenes, reflecting the quiet dislocation of living in Onomichi. Possibly shown on a monitor or projected, the piece can stand alone or expand into a multi-screen constellation using my wider archive of digital footage—wall-mounted or projected, floor-based, or integrated into tailored structures—further deepening the dialogue between the material and digital realms.
Learn more about Meet the Sealion
Spatial thinking (for context)
I often work with temporary, moveable partitions or custom structures to remap sight-lines and visitor flow, rather than relying solely on fixed walls. The aim is a site-responsive logic: wall works can cluster or stand alone; digital elements vary in scale from modest frames to murals; satin “commas” may hang, stand, or float in front of a graphic field; video/audio placement is tuned for optimal sight-lines and acoustics.
Curatorial logic (why these frictions)
The installation thinking foregrounds productive friction: flat image versus volumetric object, manual gesture versus algorithmic accident, sacred tone versus sly parody. Works behave as interdependent nodes; their resonances accumulate rather than resolve, mirroring my ongoing navigation between belonging and estrangement.
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