THE JOKE OF OMNISCIENCE
——Words before LI YIFAN's Solo exhibition of AI digital paintings
As the only teacher in the Oil Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts who didn't come from a painting background and never paints, questions like whether to paint, what to paint, why to paint, and how to paint have never been part of my personal artistic creation. These questions only exist in my teaching and aesthetic understanding. Many friends jokingly encouraged me to paint something, eager to see how my aesthetic understanding would translate into a two-dimensional, handmade creation. During the COVID-19, Yang Shu even offered me a painting studio to use when I couldn't travel for filming. I was tempted to see what I could create in two dimensions after not having touched a brush since graduating from the Academy's secondary school. But as fate would have it, an unexpected event wiped out the entire art district, including Yang Shu's studio, and my barely-begun painting career was cut short.
I discovered that AI could, in a way, generate my painting sentiments, sometimes even with surprising results. At first, I didn't take it seriously, merely considering the generated images as a supplement for some exhibitions. However, as curiosity drove me further, a strange aesthetic rupture sparked a strong desire to experiment. I wanted to see what AI could do and what relationship it had with the aesthetics we are so accustomed to. I vaguely sensed that this rapidly advancing technology would significantly impact the relationship between creators and reality, images, materials, and ideas. Perhaps, in a time when restrictions have become commonplace, I could find a new way of expression through this aesthetic rupture.
Subsequently, I spent a great deal of time studying and experiencing AI-generated art. I found that while its dynamic video capabilities were still quite immature, it had already shown tremendous potential in generating two-dimensional images, whether in photography, painting, or the space between the two. It doesn’t require any manual skills; all you need is an understanding of images, and you can bring various visions to life.
My AI creations began from the deepest recesses of my memory. Since I was working with a machine, free from the distractions of human interaction, the process was completely spontaneous. The subjective, spiritual images that had lingered in my mind, the unrealized plans for various reasons, and even some future work plans gradually took shape as I interacted with the AI. My natural curiosity led me in many directions, and at one point, my AI-generated works followed over a dozen different paths. As my exploration deepened, the weight of certain issues began to shift within me—for example, questions of artistic equality, the ethics of reconstruction, the relationship between control and passivity, how to view the alienation of chance and interpretation, and how to transform virtual freedom into inner freedom under constraints.
During my practice of AI generation, its immense possibilities—especially its deconstruction of professional authority—brought me boundless joy. It was somewhat like when I first got my hands on a DV camera and started making my own films, rendering film studios and television stations irrelevant. Yet, I remained confused about how to fully understand, define, and express the relationship between the alienation brought by technology and the conscious choices we make, and how to more directly express embodied cognition in the present moment. Sometimes, I wondered whether AI would ever be able to truly realize my inner visions, no matter how much I engaged in a back-and-forth with its algorithms. It was like trying to see a landscape through fog. By the time the exhibition creation process ended, I still couldn’t fully articulate AI’s image-generation mechanism, nor could I completely control it. To seek answers and define my works and the exhibition, I tried chatting with ChatGPT and various great thinkers and artists, hoping for inspiration or enlightenment, but the results were very limited. All-knowing does not mean all-capable.
As the exhibition approached, I had to finalize all the works, including whether or not to manually intervene in some pieces. I was aware that today many artists use AI image generation tools and then subtly disguise those alien, chance-produced images as handmade products, avoiding the aesthetic rupture AI brings—this even includes famous artists like Jeff Koons. I’ve never been against manual craftsmanship; I believe it’s a BUG in systemic power, representing a rupture between the individual and the system, which is incredibly valuable. However, in today’s art world, where there’s a supreme reverence for craftsmanship, this obsession has almost become part of systemic power itself.
Abandoning manual craftsmanship in two-dimensional expression, even using silk-screen printing like Andy Warhol, was something I had to give up. I’ve never been more conflicted in creating an exhibition; giving up craftsmanship was the only issue I was clear about. It also led me to experience two of the greatest aesthetic ruptures in the process—one being the alienation of chance. I knew that AI-generated art brought a sense of detachment and rupture, but I also knew that it wasn’t just a challenge brought by technology. It was an escape from habitual thinking, a discovery of new ways to express and view, a reevaluation of one's position in a tech-dominated world, and a chance to confront the absurdity of technology and the existential state it imposes, rediscovering and redefining one's subjectivity and existence. In fact, in recent years, I’ve realized that my understanding of many issues is increasingly inadequate. Though I still maintain strong social interactions, I often feel a sense of speechlessness. The exhibition was originally titled Still in the Mirror, referring to the need to not only continue discovering the external but also to find the right tools to reflect on one’s cognitive abilities.
Before deciding to completely abandon craftsmanship in this exhibition, I revisited the debate I had with Bao Dong more than a decade ago, where I first used the term “embodied experience.” What did it mean then? It certainly wasn’t about a fetishistic pursuit of bodily discipline, nor about the body playing with materials, nor about some kind of performative display of bodily suffering or just facing personal despair. It emphasized embodied cognition of society—how a person understands the conflict between the specificity and contingency of personal experience and social commonality.
In March of this year, while preparing for the exhibition, I went to Shipaizhen in Dongguan, as was my habit, intending to mingle with workers filming short videos about assembly line romances and see if I could capture something interesting. Instead, I was shocked by the fully automated, unmanned assembly lines and robotic arms in the village-like small factories. I was especially struck at the robotics engineer training school in Dongguan's Dongcheng, where I saw the graduation photos of the 200+ classes. I couldn’t imagine what had happened in just three or four years for technology to advance so quickly. While in the early 2010s, I had paid 12 euros to tour Volkswagen’s Industry 4.0 unmanned factory in Wolfsburg, and I knew that a factory that once employed 70,000 to 80,000 workers now only required 280 workers per shift, it had seemed like a distant show that had nothing to do with my reality.
Seeing former “Shamate” youth aimlessly wandering around after losing their jobs, hearing a hairdresser in Shipaizhen’s "Celebrity" salon talk about how difficult it was to find factory work now, and learning that even if they got hired, most couldn’t handle the long hours competing with automated lines, I suddenly received a call from a friend in Shenzhen, an architect, saying that AI had put him out of a job.
The planned trip to Guangdong quickly fell into disarray, and my initial exhibition ideas completely collapsed. I never expected the social rupture caused by rapidly advancing technology to be so swift and overwhelming. Worse, as I reflected on the classic theories and great practical examples we discuss daily, I realized that most of them are still stuck in the context of the early 2000s, rendering them impotent in addressing today’s realities.
This exhibition, for me, felt more like a restart after a humbling experience. It offered the possibility of discovering new methods of cognition and work, which brought me joy. However, I’m also acutely aware that while each technological invention extends human senses and functions, it also creates a rupture between the individual and society. But AI is different—it extends human imagination and the means to express it. Whether this rupture will lead to liberation or greater confinement, I can’t say.
In a sense, the arrival of artificial intelligence is much like the arrival of modernity—it’s not about whether you like it or not; it’s here, and it’s everywhere. I particularly appreciate the attitude of the residents of Oran in The Plague—facing something incomprehensible and irresistible, the only option is to confront it head-on and accept whatever outcome may come, for confronting the issue itself is the meaning.
