Artists who work with technology are typically viewed as nerds sequestered in studios filled with hardware, gadgetry, and complex wiring. But WangShui, an artist who made their name on innovative abstract paintings made with the assistance of AI, positions themself less as a geek than a hermit with a romantic worldview. “To me, being an artist is a spiritual project, and it always has been, no matter what tools I’ve used,” they told me during a visit to their New York studio earlier this year.
By way of example, WangShui pointed to works made for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. In a darkened gallery, WangShui exhibited gigantic aluminum panels painted with spidery, bluish strokes of oil. Up above, on the ceiling, hung a large LED screen that featured abstract imagery based on fungi, cancerous cells, and other matter that was spit out by learning models. Conceiving the piece, titled Scr∴ pe II (Isle of Vitr∴ ous), involved no small amount of emergent technology—but when WangShui actually got around to painting the installation’s aluminum panels, in the barn of an Upstate New York cow farm, the artist didn’t even have a WiFi connection.
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“People would be so shocked when they would visit because of the contrast of the work” with the studio’s setting, they said. “But to me, that’s so much a part of it, maintaining a distance and then being able to absorb the technology and information.” Doing so initiates “hyperawareness” in the face of a “constant, unintentional flow,” they added.
WangShui, Scr∴ pe II (Isle of Vitr∴ ous), 2022, at the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
Photo Alon Koppel
Perhaps that may explain why, when looking at WangShui’s work, one may never even know that AI had been involved. At the 2024 Venice Biennale, one could be forgiven for misconstruing their paintings—also containing spectral markings resembling tentacles and nervous systems—for abstractions made entirely by hand. Instead, just as was the case with the works at the Whitney Biennial, the compositions for these pieces were developed with machine learning systems, then translated by hand onto aluminum panels that wound up covering large, luminous windows in the final room of the Arsenale. WangShui said they were on a “journey” with these works to better understand “how machine learning could mirror our consciousness.”
“I’ve never been interested in what AI could do, or humans versus AI,” WangShui said. “It’s just about: What can it show us about consciousness that we didn’t know?” They added that AI was just another tool in their practice, alongside oil paint and aluminum paneling. That tool, they said, “can be used for destruction and violence, but it can also be used for something like healing.”
WangShui’s lipid muse (2024) at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Photo Nick Ash
One of the greatest expressions of that notion is currently on view at the SITE Santa Fe International, where WangShui, working with their friend Maryam Hoseini, has covered SITE’s glass facade in swirls of red oil and black ink. Titled The Demon and the Muse (DM), the piece represents synergy and mutual growth—a mind meld that combines both artist’s styles, with the digitally created serpentine forms of prior WangShui paintings showing up again here. That snake, WangShui said, “represents this flow of data that can be violent, but can also do good.”
Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the SITE Santa Fe International, said that the piece was “not just a way of celebrating their friendship and their collaboration, but also pushing their practice to a new level.” She praised the work for “bringing together these two worlds—technology and the body, or, if you like, the digital and the analog.”
This merger of digital and analog has led many different curators with many different sets of interests to exhibit WangShui’s art. Their work is currently featured in a Copenhagen Contemporary group exhibition about humanoids and was highlighted in a just-closed solo show at Cy Twombly’s former studio in Italy, whose owner, the Fondazione Iris, has largely displayed an interest in painterly abstraction. Their work also prominently figured in the Guggenheim Museum’s 2023 show “Going Dark,” which was themed around states of semi-invisibility; they have shown in surveys of queer art by artists of Asian descent and in exhibitions about posthuman futures. In 2026, they will appear in a sprawling show about art and technology at the New Museum.
WangShui’s Ambiguous Congress (2023), a painting that appeared in the 2023 Guggenheim Museum exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.”
Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto
WangShui’s work may be appearing in so many places because it is so mysterious and therefore wide open to interpretation. Their 2024 show at Kurimanzutto in New York, for example, featured elusive abstractions with spiky frames and was presented without a customary press release to explain them. These paintings had a rich background: WangShui told me they were “portraits” meant as gifts for past lovers and current friends, and that the pieces were accordingly not for sale; one was even meant as a memorial for a friend’s deceased dog. The frames, meanwhile, were produced in the Crown of Thorns style of woodworking, and the panels themselves were square to mirror the shape of pixels. “I really loved the idea of portraying my friends as these saint characters in my life,” they said.
WangShui and Maryam Hoseini, The Demon and the Muse (DM), 2025, at the SITE Santa Fe International.
Courtesy the artists and Kurimanzutto
But none of this was relayed to the public, so I asked why. “I really wanted it to be experiential,” WangShui told me, petting their dog Oracle, who trotted around a set of in-progress aluminum panels while we spoke. “I do think we’re at a point where language has such a heavy hand in our perception of art that it’s creating viewers that can’t be present with the works. My experiment with the show was: What happens if we remove language—not even for the audience, but also for me?”
Accordingly, while working toward an upcoming White Cube show in London, WangShui has been thinking through phenomena that are hard to explain. They said they were interested in piloerection, which most people call “goosebumps”—something experienced because of a sublime sight or sound. WangShui said they experience piloerection while making their paintings, which involve dragging dental picks across aluminum, then using sandpaper to smooth out the marks. “If someone’s on the phone with me while I’m making one, they’re dying,” WangShui said with a laugh. “But to me, that’s the best part.”
WangShui was not initially so comfortable with painting. Born in 1986 in Dallas, WangShui started out as a filmmaker. Having studied social anthropology and art as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, the young artist turned to video as an MFA student at Bard College. In comparison to their paintings, their early videos are strikingly direct: one hypnotic piece from 2018 focuses specifically on Hong Kong luxury towers and the relationship between that city and mainland China. But, WangShui said, “even when I was making videos, I was always thinking about painting.” They said that, during the pandemic, they “retired” and began to paint.
WangShui’s Encoded (2025), a work that appeared in their Fondazione Iris show.
Photo Giorgio Benni/©WangShui/Courtesy the artist and Amanita
The first paintings they produced derived from The Bachelor, ABC’s long-running dating show. But rather than representing rose ceremonies and spicy encounters, WangShui focused on trees from the backgrounds of scenes and other unrecognizable details. No AI was involved in these initial works, but after they were complete, WangShui fed images of those five pieces into a machine learning system, using them as the source code for future paintings. The act was generative in more sense than one. “I would say that machine learning was the genesis of my painting practice,” they said of that decision.
Since then, they have continued to move into mediums such as performance, staging one such work called Atlacoya, La Culebra at last year’s Venice Biennale. With Israel’s war in Gaza in mind, WangShui enlisted Alberto Bustamante as a collaborator for a work that would “study love from all of these different angles, from quantum angles and social levels,” the artist said. “I really wanted to think: what is it that I can put into the world right now?” The resultant piece, inspired by a visit to an anechoic chamber, was an opera of sorts, with rituals intended to channel precolonial knowledge. (Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, another 2024 Venice Biennale participant and a friend of WangShui, contributed the costumes.)
The piece was decidedly analog, even though it was staged in close proximity of WangShui’s digitally minded paintings and an LED mesh that appeared to breathe. The artist said it was all a part of the same effort to better understand compassion. “It’s become my deep obsession,” they said. “It’s the antidote to all this violence. It’s the only thing that can save us.”
