WangShui on Painting, AI, and Dematerialising Identity at Rockbund Art Museum

WangShui's first solo museum show at Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum features eight floor-installed paintings and a series of abstracted mythical organisms on fabric-covered walls. A custom algorithm measures ultrasonic frequencies in the space, generating a new layout for the floor paintings each Friday, which are manually rearranged. In September, they will exhibit new paintings at Haus der Kunst in Munich alongside a multichannel AI simulation, where the AI's live evolution will dictate new configurations. WangShui began painting during the pandemic, using aluminium panels for their built-in backlight, and collaborates with AI by feeding their own paintings into a dataset that generates images they then reinterpret. The artist cites Claude Monet and Francis Bacon as influences, and their practice explores mediated loops, perception, and the entanglement of human and machine. The Whitney Museum acquired a painting by WangShui in 2021, initially cataloguing it as a sculpture.