I / It was to be expected that the pictures would one day start to move. They were never intended to be rigid representations. Sometimes, a donkey driver could be seen in the foreground, swinging his stick. Or a group of travellers moving through the picture, along the river, with high mountains behind them. There was the monk on the winding path leading up to the temple, or farewell scenes such as the one with the man walking away with his servant while the woman still leans against the door of the house and looks after him.

You could lose yourself in all these landscapes that China bequeathed to the world, painted with a fluid brush and ink. The atmosphere invited you to dream, the cloudiness of the ink, while the stroke, which owed itself to the most precise observation, presented the dreams as realities. And so the eye wandered; the play of thoughts was set in motion. There was much to discover in the painted world, which was also an inner world.

II / I discover Liu Yi in this painted landscape. Liu Yi is very old; she is 1000, perhaps even 1500 years old. But we are not talking about the person here, that much should be clear, but about the artist, who develops her language from the sweep of the brush and the flow of the ink, from observation and memory and from the repertoire of Chinese painting.

The common term for this language is "animation", and like any language, it has a multitude of idioms, starting with the phenakistiscope at the beginning of the 19th century. We'd better leave the long history of animation out of the equation, but note that the term is at the very least misleading. After all, it suggests that things were lifeless, even soulless, before they were animated. But as ancient Chinese painting teaches us, things were never lifeless. They were embedded in a practice of viewing images that is no longer (or only in rare moments) ours.

III / Liu Yi creates in the present. The artist's subjects originate from the present. But here, too, many of today's things - such as feelings of longing or the difficulty of harmonising one's own desires with societal demands - can be very old. However, the global present also has its own special features. First and foremost, the present is not a single time. The time that "Morning and Dusk, and No More" captures in Cyprus is different from the time that a Chinese chef spends in Japan ("Nice to Meet You"), or the dreamtime - the time that consists only of transitions, in which nothing is fixed, as in "Origins of Species".

The present is a scattering of often irreconcilable opposites, a sea of flickering flames, as "Burning" shows, in which the human form - the form of the self - threatens to dissolve. Whereby "dissolution" does not necessarily mean an end, as every new beginning, every rebirth presupposes a "death by flame". And this seems to me to be the key to Liu Yi's use of animation as an artistic medium: the dynamic combination of the seemingly incompatible.

IV / Part of the theme of the "seemingly incompatible" is that Liu Yi seeks artistic contact with the machine, or more precisely with computer technology and machine intelligence. This interface is a grey area that is both hyped and feared. We can guess what monsters or possibilities are hidden in this cloud of fog and also how crucial this grey area is for future humanity.

The artist moves between algorithm and human ingenuity, between fear and euphoria, in this cloud of fog. Specifically, Liu Yi feeds the intelligent machine with sketches and sceneries; she teaches or trains the algorithm to create the animated visual worlds in relative autonomy. During this process, "glitches" or errors occur in the machine, which does not recognise this or that reality, i.e., does not know how to decode it. Instead of falling silent, however, the machine creates a "poetic production" in place of its ignorance: a piece of spontaneous information that is beyond any meaning. The artist refers to these creations as "digital ghosts".

The "digital ghosts" in turn serve Liu Yi as fodder for her own artistic process, which integrates the "perceptions" of the machine into the medium of Chinese painting, into the language of ink, pigments and brushstrokes. This open process is documented in "Unknown Mistakes of Elaborate Creations" - idiosyncratic pictorial forms that combine painting, code and film script sketches.

V / In some respects, such a method has a long tradition. Artists have always tried to integrate the spontaneous life of the material, i.e. its natural resistance, into their working process. Colour flows, and the processes can only be controlled to a limited extent. However, such moments of relative loss of control give the artist freedom. They pave the way to a world that is more associative in nature, as it does not recognise any established meanings.

Let us therefore note that the grey area is an anthropological constant and that human creativity has always fished in the murky waters. What is new, however, is the interface between man and intelligent machine, which is an incomparably more powerful entity than anything that came before modernity. Because this machine is a social actor; it learns or is trained to shape society. Is that frightening? Undoubtedly. Nevertheless, there is no sensible alternative to putting machine intelligence at the service of humanity.

In other words, we are faced with the task of harmonising the truth of the code with the beauty of the code. At least Liu Yi is undertaking this task, and "Burning" shows it: the flickering flames in which the human form is lost or found are painted as well as AI-generated.

VI / It would be wrong to simply assume that machine intelligence is cold and inhuman. "Morning and Dusk, and No More" gives us another idea. Liu Yi was a guest artist in Salamiou, a small, remote village in Cyprus. Vrionis, the village secretary, was responsible for the residency. He took on the task of showing Liu Yi the surroundings: the world of the village, the hilly landscape with its fields and animals. These explorations led to conversations, such as with a shepherd, which the artist, who was filming all this, was unable to follow. The meaning of the words only became clear to her later in the studio in Hangzhou, when the conversations were translated.

As in many rural regions, the younger generation around Salamiou had more or less fled and moved to the city. Old people dominated the scene and set the leisurely pace. It was a kind of documentation of pastoral life that Liu Yi was engaged in, contemporary to be sure, but essentially not much different from the ancient Chinese landscapes I mentioned at the beginning. "Morning and Dusk, and No More", as the title says, where "No More" can mean both that there was nothing more or that no more was needed.

The unfamiliar yet familiar landscape of Cyprus invited the artist with her film camera to reflect on contemporary China, on the contrast between a rural, almost needless way of life and the ambivalent blessings of hypermodern civilisation. And then Liu Yi crossed a threshold. She met Vrionis' family, his mother and sister with Down's syndrome.

The scenes in the house, like the pictures outside, revolve around simple, everyday things: cutting bread, feeding the sister, whose behaviour or movements are determined by Down's syndrome, but who is an integral part of the whole.

However, the spectacle of life in Salamoiu is only revealed to the viewer after Liu Yi has edited her footage and passed it through the filter of animation. This turns the filmed reality into a sign language.

VII / What exactly happens during the animation process is somewhat beyond description. The transformation is extremely subtle. Some graphic contours become sharper; forms run out. The intelligent machine registers the real movements, people, things, and landscape differently than mere artistic subjectivity can. It is true that the painter's hand aims at the essence of things (be it a galloping horse or a bamboo grove). But this "essence" remains a question of interpretation, and this also applies to Liu Yi. In any case, the machine, or more precisely AI, has a different idea of the essential, if one can speak of an "idea" at all.

The world as painted or "animated" by the algorithm is, as already indicated, not a dull, mechanical world. It may be alien to the human eye in some respects, but is equally enlightening. The AI sets different, unfamiliar accents in perception, but for us humans, these can enhance the impression of reality.

While the machine thus interprets the world differently, the graphic stroke, which we associate with the eye, soul and artistic intelligence, becomes a third element that is neither human nor machine.

As if art were the trail of something future.

RMB, Feb 26, 2025