Tishan Hsu saw the future coming as early as the 1980s, when he began producing abstract paintings with sculptural additions that looked variously like warping screens and torqued body parts. Beyond the body horror seen in David Cronenberg’s films, there wasn’t much out there that looked like Hsu’s paintings of the era. But now, with digital technology having become so fully integrated into daily life, Hsu’s paintings—both the ones produced when he started and the ones he is making now—seem oddly familiar.
Perhaps this is why Hsu, 74, has only recently gained a large following. In 2020, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles staged his first-ever museum survey, paving the way for his Venice Biennale debut two years later. At that Biennale, Hsu memorably showed such works as a table-like structure complete with purple silicone face poking through it. Hsu was one of the older living participants in that Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, whose exhibition also featured a range of younger artist envisioning new possibilities for the body.
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Yet Hsu has not rested on his laurels, because if anything, his work has only gotten weirder. In his first show with Lisson Gallery (through January 24), whose roster he recently joined, Hsu is showing paintings on wood boards that were made with a new tool in his arsenal: AI, whose ability to churn out surrealistic imagery the artist has embraced with aplomb. In this New York show, there are paintings in which skin merges with stomata, as well as a video in which organs flow together with blades of grass. There’s also a gigantic print featuring a spread of unforgettable images, including one in which hole burrows deep into a chest.
While installers were putting the finishing touches on that new video, for which an image of grass from Hsu’s desktop was fed into a gaming engine, the artist spoke with ARTnews about how AI lent him a fresh language to talk about his work.
This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.
ARTnews: Do you recall when you first started using AI?
Tishan Hsu: It happened around the time of ChatGPT, I think around last year or the year before. Adobe was really pushing it. When you went into Photoshop, it would say, “Here’s this new thing, generative AI. Please try it, and we’ll give you a beta test.” They wanted you to be a guinea pig, so it was really easy to jump into it. At the time, you got a sense of the magnitude of what it was doing through the visuals, because you could see how strange it was. For artists and images, it was like, Oh my god, what is this? AI changed what the work was about. I couldn’t have said what I’m saying here without the tool.
I find the images [produced by AI] aesthetically very compelling, but I try not to judge them because I try not to think of them using our human subjectivity—these [images] are not necessarily people. They’re similar to us, but they’re stranger-looking. And that is really what technology is. AI is a strange thing that is very powerful, but it’s not necessarily like us, so there is that distancing, even though we created it.
A lot of artists are very concerned about putting their images into AI. Do you think you’re taking back control by using your hand to alter the images you generate?
When I’m working, I’m not aware of these issues. But I am using very analog media—drawing and painting are very much in my work, which has always been considered retro. It’s trying to hold onto that while also trying to move into new imaging technologies.
I’m also moving across many different mediums. The drawings are moving across the boards and the paintings. In the earlier works made around 2001, I used a steel mesh, photographed that, and then layered the mesh over bodies and skin. I love drawing by hand, and this new work still has the mesh quality. But now, I don’t need to use a metal mesh—this is all done with analog graphite. Then I photograph it and process it, and use it in the paintings. If you want, you can see it conceptually: I don’t need images of the body anymore because my body is in the work through the actual process.
Tishan Hsu, skin-fur-mesh-blue (detail), 2025.
©2025 North First Studio/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Lisson Gallery
If the mesh weren’t so warped, it would look like a grid. When I think of a grid, I think of Minimalism, which was in fashion when you were coming up as an artist. Is your work related to Minimalism?
I definitely feel rooted in what Minimalism and Post-Minimalism were trying to do. When I developed these boards, there was no screen at the time—we were just watching TV. I still really admired the intellectual honesty of Frank Stella’s “Black Paintings,” that they were real objects on a wall, that you could recognize that in the thing itself. I wanted to break out of the pictorial window through which you go into another world. By making it more of a curve, it becomes more of a thing, more of an object. At the same time, paradoxically, you get into a hyper-illusion—so it’s an object, but it’s also an illusion of an object. Is this real, or is it an image? I like the idea that my work comes from something seemingly so opposite to it, which is this grey, Minimalist art. I don’t know if those artists would agree, but for me, it’s very much there.
It seems like your work is also about when order falls apart. In your new piece skin-fur-mesh-blue, silicone objects are arranged in a grid, but they protrude out at varying angles, and they’re not evenly sculpted. They’re not perfect objects.
Separately from this intellectual idea about Minimalism, it’s this real-world sense of the organic and the body. For me, this is more about distorting the order of technology. I’m looking for the leaks and the glitches. It’s asserting the organic in this technological space, and I think that’s perhaps what the Minimalists or the technologists weren’t thinking about. They were more interested in technological transcendence. They thought technology and order would wipe away all our problems of the body. I want to take a more critical position, saying, “I don’t think our body problems will go away.” At the same time, technology is taking over, and it’s a different problem now. It’s both/and rather than one or the other.
Tishan Hsu, stomata-skin-3, 2025.
©2025 North First Studio/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Are you thinking about your own body in relation to these works, or is it someone else’s body?
At a certain point, it’s an abstraction, but it’s an abstraction in the way that we’re living now. When I started out, it was this idea that our bodies went through this ether, through the window of the screen, through the internet. Everybody’s connected in this weird liquid soup, so for me, it’s this poetic vision of the body. It’s not physically one body in one place. How do you visualize that? That was the whole vision for the practice. And in fact, 25 years ago, I could not have talked about what we’re talking about now. All of this came over time, now that I can see what the work is about.
But don’t you think that this language was already brewing during the 1980s, with David Cronenberg’s movies and films like Altered States?
Well, people have mentioned Cronenberg since the ’80s, so yes. And there was fiction and music, so yes, people were picking up on it. But I specifically wanted to visualize it, and I didn’t want to be too conceptual about it.
Tishan Hsu, skin-screen: emergence (quadriptych), 2023.
©2025 North First Studio/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Lisson Gallery
In skin-screen: emergence (quadriptych), from 2023, there’s what appears to be a medical scan. Whose body is that?
That’s an AI combination of a dog’s skull and a human’s skull. A lot of the work is combining the mammalian world so that it’s more continuous. [Beneath the image of the skulls] is a friend’s navel, and then I threw in a pig skin, so the AI put it together the way it is where it feels like it’s really growing. When I started working with AI, maybe two years ago, it was very crude—95 to 99 percent of the images it would give me were totally unusable. For this one, it initially gave me a pig being thrown over a person’s body, but then it would give me ones like this that were really strange.
Tishan Hsu, ears-screen-skin with casts: New York (Lisson), 2025
©2025 North First Studio/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Lisson Gallery
A lot of people have said your work is creepy, and I think some might even be horrified by this show. But do you consider your work scary?
I do. [Laughs] Frankly, with some of the images that my assistants and I come up with using AI, I say, “This is just too graphic. We’re not going to do this.” Depending on the AI software we use, it might even say [back], “We can’t do it,” so we’ll have to try different words. And you have to wait a long time for the AI, too. It has very deep resistance to using body imagery, which I support on some level.
This work [ears-screen-skin with casts: New York (Lisson), a 2025 print that measures 52 feet wide] uses a lot of AI imagery, and I’m really concerned it’s going to put people off. That will be a test. For me, it’s off-putting, but it also expresses the radicality of what technology is doing to us and which we’re not recognizing. It’s very violent, and it’s so seductive. So, perhaps what we’re really doing is shocking our bodies. But as things keep going, people of the future may not think this is even shocking anymore, because they’ve already lived it!
I’m an organ transplant recipient, and I never imagined I would be one. My friends wanted to see if I was a different species now. They had no idea what happens when a person gets a transplant, and neither did I. Actually, it was so mundane on some level, so simple, that it was just kind of surprising. I lived through the shock of the body, through what technological and medical research is doing right now. All of this is already on the way, with artificial pig organs being transplanted into bodies. It’s really just the world we’re living in. It’s not that far away, and it’s not sci-fi.
