Artist WangShui Uses AI and Paint to Map the Invisible Architecture of Love

WangShui calls themselves a romantic hermit, not a tech geek. They paint in a barn without WiFi, feed images into machine learning systems, and exhibit the results on aluminum panels in Venice. The contradiction is deliberate—a way of staying grounded while reaching toward something harder to name than "innovation."

"To me, being an artist is a spiritual project, and it always has been, no matter what tools I've used," they said. That tools part matters. For WangShui, oil paint and machine learning aren't opposites. They're both ways of asking the same question: What can show us about consciousness that we didn't know before.

At the 2022 Whitney Biennial, WangShui exhibited massive aluminum panels covered in spidery blue strokes, painted in that upstate New York barn. Above them, an LED screen displayed abstract forms—fungi, cancerous cells, other matter—generated by AI. Visitors would arrive expecting high-tech sterility and find instead the smell of hay and oil paint. "People would be so shocked when they would visit because of the contrast of the work with the studio's setting," WangShui said. "But to me, that's so much a part of it, maintaining a distance and then being able to absorb the technology and information."

Two years later at the Venice Biennale, their paintings looked like they could have been made entirely by hand—tentacles and nervous systems rendered in spectral markings. They weren't. Machine learning generated the compositions. WangShui then translated them onto aluminum panels covering luminous windows. The work doesn't announce itself as "AI art." It just exists, asking you to feel it.

Love as the Antidote

WangShui's latest piece, "The Demon and the Muse (DM)," now on view at SITE Santa Fe International, pairs their digitally created serpentine forms with the work of collaborator Maryam Hoseini. The snake, WangShui explained, "represents this flow of data that can be violent, but can also do good." The piece is about synergy—what happens when two artists feed each other's work back through their own vision.

This matters because WangShui has moved from asking what AI can do to asking what it can teach us about being human. "I've never been interested in what AI could do, or humans versus AI," they said. "It's just about: What can it show us about consciousness that we didn't know?" A tool, they note, can be used for destruction or healing. The question is which one you choose.

WangShui wasn't always a painter. Born in Dallas in 1986, they started as a filmmaker, making hypnotic videos about Hong Kong luxury towers. During the pandemic, they "retired" and began painting, initially pulling images from The Bachelor. Those paintings became source code—fed into machine learning systems that generated new compositions, which WangShui then painted by hand. "I would say that machine learning was the genesis of my painting practice," they said.

For the Venice Biennale, they collaborated with performer Alberto Bustamante on a work called "Atlacoya, La Culebra," inspired by a visit to an anechoic chamber—a room of total silence. The piece was meant to "study love from all of these different angles, from quantum angles and social levels." It sounds abstract. It is. But the obsession behind it is very specific.

"It's become my deep obsession," WangShui said. "It's the antidote to all this violence. It's the only thing that can save us."

That's not a tech statement. It's a love statement. And maybe that's the real collaboration—between the machine that can process infinite patterns and the human who insists on meaning.