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Sougwen Chung on Aggregated Abandon

Sougwen Chung’s solo exhibition RECURSIONS 遞迴 (2026) combines robotics, AI, painting and performance in a protocolic stack. The artist and researcher exploring symbiosis between robotics and living systems spoke to Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the work. They discuss data as self-portrait and what it means to co-author with a machine.

RECURSIONS 遞迴 will appear at Art Basel Hong Kong’s Zero 10 and is presented by Fellowship and ARTXCODE.
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Peter Bauman: You’ve talked about becoming machine-readable to make a machine collaborator. To move beyond the self, you had to rigorously quantify it. Your scroll work at Art Basel Hong Kong, RECURSION 0, draws on biosensor input in real time. What do you hope this current move beyond the self teaches you?
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Sougwen Chung: The contradiction is not lost on me. RECURSION 0 brings the past ten years of works with my co-aesthetic systems (D.O.U.G.) into the larger dataset of drawings I’ve created in my life. It is a type of devotion, perhaps, this maintenance of personal data, a way of reflecting on time as expressed through movement and line.

RECURSION 0 and its corresponding thirty-year dataset rendered on an LED mesh of similar scale reflect the duality of the practice. It shows the physicality of calligraphic ink on linen with conductive traces left by hand and machine. Then the abstraction of the computational, transformer models trained on a decade of gestural data, its biosignal flowing through the system. For me, it’s important that the two don't resolve.

Instead, they offer a provocation to the viewer like a kind of litmus test, asking which side they are drawn towards: the physical, the computational, both, neither? There’s a tension in the duality of exploring movement as data and data as movement via these extended systems.
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It is a move beyond the self and also you could argue an extreme self-centering, an aggregated abandon.

I’m not necessarily sure what it teaches but there’s a wider truth about that contradiction that feels like the creative moment we’re in. It's true that practitioners feel robbed of consent when their work is used to train large generative models, which, distinctly, my work is not using. By exploring personal artistic data and authorship in the way that I do, it's given me a way of learning about the materiality of the system. I’m reclaiming authorship from within it, through extension, through recursion.

“Recursion” is a mathematical term that posits time and authorship as cyclical, scaffolded by loops and echoes with material consequences. The seed-scroll, from which the other works emanate, is a ten-meter scroll that will be completed at the fair. The paintings in the series carry the recursive logic across process, material and calligraphic tradition.

I’m excited to share RECURSIONS in Hong Kong through the performative lens, the process in action.
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I’m drawn to performance because it feels as imagery becomes increasingly generated, process and presence reveal what’s at stake in artistic practice. 

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‍Peter Bauman: How is your process revealing that tension you described in your practice? And you’ve also spoken about D.O.U.G. as a mirror. When machine intelligence becomes a genuine relational partner, what does that new reflective surface reveal?
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Sougwen Chung: By way of process, I’ve built a new system on data not only authored by myself but co-aesthetically derived from the artifacts I’ve created over the past decade with D.O.U.G. As I paint, different waves of my EEG are captured through a custom brainwave sensor and modulate which areas of the model’s learned gesture space are activated.

There’s a recursive loop that extends beyond simple data recollection into something non-cognitive and embodied. It varies session by session. I’m still learning how to paint with it, which is the most exciting part. It’s like developing a gestural hyperintuition.

Materially, I communicate these relational tensions through two chemically incompatible ink systems. One is a water-based calligraphic ink of carbon black and phthalocyanine pigment in acrylic polymer emulsion. The second is a custom metallic ink that’s bioresin-based, augmented with 99.99% pure silver microparticles with conductive properties and combined with silk fibroin protein, a biocompatible substance derived from silk cocoons.
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The two inks react and push away from each other on the canvas, adding a layer of material tension. When they meet, the calligraphic gestures become sculptural and metallic, intertwined and separate, catching the light based on the viewer’s position. The material itself, on linen, unfolds a narrative of lineage and biomateriality in which commingled lines linked to bioelectricity leave conductive traces.

As for what the new reflective surface reveals, I stumbled upon this re-reading of Édouard Glissant the other day in Life in Progress by Hans Ulrich Obrist. He writes about archipelagic thought, where neither individual nor collective identities are fixed. You can remain yourself while at the same time being interested in “the exterior” and forming a relationship with “the other.”

It resonates with this notion of co-aesthetics, cognition situated across human and machine bodies that’s prismatic rather than fixed, oscillating between states of self and othering.

‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned the recursive feedback loop from D.O.U.G. as differently embodied: rhythmic and recursive, rather than verbal or emotional. Do you feel that loop has a readable structure, one you could in principle fully trace and explain? Or has D.O.U.G. developed tendencies that feel genuinely outside what you designed?‍

‍Sougwen Chung: When I first created MEMORY in 2016, I trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) on two decades of my drawing data. The capacity for my robotic system to recall and regenerate my drawing gestures based on my own input on canvas was a way to engage with different temporal modes of my own artistic authorship.

I was curious how that could or couldn’t be machine-readable, using the neural networks that were popular at the time. Over the years I’ve further complicated this idea, thinking about authorship and extension as biosignal.

In 2015, I first became interested in the possibility of beauty in a non-human move. D.O.U.G. as a system allows me to experience that which is outside of my sensory apparatus (crowd data, biosignal, drawings over time) at a scale and temporal register I can process. Surprise is a condition of the system.
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Peter Bauman: Your work at Art Basel Hong Kong is a demonstration of your idea of Operational Art, artmaking as an ecology in which coexistence becomes indistinguishable from authorship. Ecologies are indifferent to their participants and don’t require a designer to keep generating. Are you thinking about work that no longer needs you to continue?
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Sougwen Chung: The system has operated as a creative catalyst for my mark-making. Operational Art is a practice and curatorial framework I've been developing. It's built on porous systems of protocols, thresholds and sequences, a distillation of what I've learned through over a decade of Drawing Operations and some forthcoming research projects I have yet to share. Among them is a new body of work that extends the biosignal and ecological dimensions of the practice into an institutional context and scale for the first time.

The position foregrounds the visible and not-so-visible dimensions of authorship while remaining open to resonance across mediums. It's an extension of my work in co-aesthetic systems: it interweaves humans, machines and ecologies in a way where empathy is an operational current.
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Human agency is neither privileged nor collapsed.

As for work that no longer needs me, for me, the work itself is an exploration of relation, at its heart. While the fantasy of autonomy feels like it drives so much of the landscape of technology today, full luxury autonomy is a false flag and largely deterministic in nature.

The work of relation and the promise of connection are ultimately more challenging, more true and more consistent with what we want. The work of relation is a story that doesn’t yet have an ending.



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Sougwen Chung is an artist and researcher sketching symbiosis across robotics, living systems and drawing operations. Chung's multidisciplinary practice spans installation, drawing, performance, and sculpture in dialogue with robotics, machine learning, and biosensing.
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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.