Wenfei Quan

Seeing is unsettling.

Even more so when an image of oneself begins to morph into something seemingly autonomous. Technologies intensify this uncanniness: images detach from bodies, circulate, multiply, and return to us as something unfamiliar.

For Wenfei Quan, our relationship to contemporary technology is strangely prehistoric. We are thrust into systems whose mech- anisms we barely comprehend, yet learn to navigate their interfaces almost intuitively. The interface, after all, is made to face the human. The face/interface becomes a point of contact between the biological and the technological.

Using eye scans as visual material, both literally and metaphorically, symmetry as a method, and printmaking as a vehicle, Quan turns intimate traces of the body into images that resemble organisms, landscapes, or unknown species.

This movement between recognition and estrangement extends from the body’s interior to its most familiar surface: the face. In the Mole series, Quan observes the existing moles on each sitter’s face, then uses a makeup pencil to add corresponding moles symmetrically on the opposite side before photographing them. A mark that appeared by chance is duplicated; the randomness of the body is quietly rearranged into order. The face remains the same, yet somehow seems to belong to no one, as if generated out of the void.

Symmetry appears at once mechanical and deeply organic, belonging as much to technological reproduction as to the structures of living things.

Contemporary Hominin, the artist’s AI-generated virtual avatar as well as the exhibition’s title, holds a similar contradiction. “Contemporary” situates us in the immediate present; “hominin” places us within the long history of human evolution.

Fed with these thoughts about art and lived experiences as material, an AI fabricated a sentence that was equally unsettling yet uncannily precise. Of everything it returned, this resonated most with Quan:

"At that moment

On the edge of the night

Mutes of the underwolrd appeared to me

Calling out, stripped of all illusions.

In a silent, symmetrical universe."