The Ground Beneath the Ground
13.07.2026
The Ground Beneath the Ground is a research and studio project exploring the entanglement of geological time and computational time through the specific material archive of Hollabrunn.
My practice, which I call Techno-Craft, works at the intersection of traditional East Asian mineral pigment painting (iwaenogu) and custom-trained AI systems. I hand-grind pigments from raw stone, mix them with animal glue, and apply them to paper — a method rooted in the earliest East Asian mural traditions. In my ongoing work Asymptote, the physical act of painting is placed in dialogue with an AI model trained on my previous works: a camera captures the painting in progress, the AI generates real-time interpretations, and I respond to those responses. The loop never resolves. Human hand and machine vision approach one another along a line that cannot meet.
Every loop needs a starting point, and until now that starting point has come from inside my own visual world. The InSILo residency offers a first prompt drawn from the ground itself. The landscape around Hollabrunn holds a remarkable material archive. The Hollabrunn–Mistelbach Formation — named after this place — records a proto-Danube river that flowed here ten million years ago, depositing gravels from the Alps and the Bohemian Massif. Above these older beds lies thick loess, blown here over the past two and a half million years by ice-age winds. Beneath it all, the sediments of the Paratethys Sea, which covered this land fifteen million years ago.
Every loop needs a starting point, and until now that starting point has come from inside my own visual world. The InSILo residency offers a first prompt drawn from the ground itself. The landscape around Hollabrunn holds a remarkable material archive. The Hollabrunn–Mistelbach Formation — named after this place — records a proto-Danube river that flowed here ten million years ago, depositing gravels from the Alps and the Bohemian Massif. Above these older beds lies thick loess, blown here over the past two and a half million years by ice-age winds. Beneath it all, the sediments of the Paratethys Sea, which covered this land fifteen million years ago.
What draws me most is the loess. The loess of Hollabrunn and the loess of the Chinese Loess Plateau share the same origin — both were deposited by ice-age winds from the same atmospheric systems. My father, a geologist, spent years in fieldwork across Ningxia and Qinghai, walking on that same ancient dust. In a small way, this ground is not entirely unfamiliar to me.
During the residency I will walk, collect, and grind: gathering local soils, stones, and plant materials; learning the particular colours and densities of this land; making pigments from what the ground offers. These materials, translated through observation and painting, will become the first prompt of a new iteration of Asymptote — a version of the feedback loop that begins not from my existing visual language but from the textures, colours and atmosphere of a place neither I nor the machine has encountered before.
Underneath this methodology sits a quieter question: what does it mean to approach a place through geology rather than inherited history? As a Chinese artist living in the UK, I have grown used to looking at landscapes that hold histories I cannot claim. Geological time offers a different scale. The loess blown across this plain carries no national identity. A ten-million-year-old river deposit belongs to no one. The ground receives everyone equally.
During the residency I will walk, collect, and grind: gathering local soils, stones, and plant materials; learning the particular colours and densities of this land; making pigments from what the ground offers. These materials, translated through observation and painting, will become the first prompt of a new iteration of Asymptote — a version of the feedback loop that begins not from my existing visual language but from the textures, colours and atmosphere of a place neither I nor the machine has encountered before.
Underneath this methodology sits a quieter question: what does it mean to approach a place through geology rather than inherited history? As a Chinese artist living in the UK, I have grown used to looking at landscapes that hold histories I cannot claim. Geological time offers a different scale. The loess blown across this plain carries no national identity. A ten-million-year-old river deposit belongs to no one. The ground receives everyone equally.
