2023. Adobe Illustrator and Printed on A1 Matt Paper.

The infographic investigates the anatomy of thought and selfhood through a fusion of digital art, philosophy, and psychological inquiry. Using scientific diagrams, psychiatric texts, and layered visuals, immersive compositions explore how knowledge, memory, and mental states manifest in physical and digital forms, blurring boundaries between the biological and symbolic, the real and the representational.

The laws and physics of light are dissected diagramically for analysis of how they can be perceived by humans. Light thrusts into every cell of us, and through light, we are granted the capacity to observe ourselves and our surroundings.

The diagram is also 3D-printed onto a book stack for audiences to browse through layers of the infographics, and a zine with translucent layers so audiences can view each layer of lines separately.

Exhibition

The work is exhibited at the Optical Intermediate show in Depford Town Hall, London, United Kingdom in January 2025. I assisted in installation of the exhibition.

Optical Intermediate explores the interplay between perception, technology, and artistic mediation. The exhibition is hosted at the historic Deptford Town Hall, once a military tribunal during World War I for conscientious objectors.

The exhibition space is accompanied by a unique monitoring room, situated adjacent to the gallery. Equipped with a network of cameras capturing live footage from the exhibition, this room reconfigures these recordings into dynamic visual compositions. Visitors can step into this space to experience an alternative lens on the exhibition, navigating fragmented and mediated perspectives in real time.

The 3D-printed book stack places the book containing translucent layers of the print. These are before the printing supports are disassembled from the object.

When audiences look under the LED light of the print, the light will be refracted into a rainbow colour, adding physical dimension to the 2D work.

Process

Zine

Moodboard

Details

Artist Statement

The infographic explores how thought and selfhood take shape through digital art, philosophy, and psychology. Drawing on scientific diagrams, psychiatric texts, and layered imagery, it visualises knowledge, memory, and mental states in physical and digital forms, blurring the line between the biological and the symbolic, and the real.

The radiating texts surrounding the skull are a listing of diseases from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Diseases, Fifth Edition with an urge to understand how mental states function like digital bloodstreams through our skeletons, our souls presented in different moods or personalities categorized by the academia, which feels confining, but a platform to express ourselves with the texts adhered to our abstract behaviors and sensations. Therefore, I transform these philo-psychological textual descriptions into music keys, biological diagrams, and connections of numbers dot to dot to form anatomical structures. The skeleton of knowledge and experiences has a radioactive energy visualized in atom radiation pathways in quantum physics, rhizomatic growth of neurons.

The see-through anatomical analysis of myself presents an aesthetic version of the signifying world destroyed, with the real underneath floating to the top and radiating in front of our eyes. A chaotic symphony: we humans trying to find rhythms and structures in the chaotic real that resists scientific or metaphysical definitions.

In the final presentation form, As an extension, I print the work in different layers on translucent polyester film paper and pile them up with sewing booking binding methods onto a black plastic board, making the digital image interactive to audiences’ sensation, in addition to the changes in views when they flip through the pages.

Bibliography excerpt
Dostoevsky, F. (2009) Notes from Unerground and the Double. Penguin Classics. United States: New York.
McKay, M., Wood, J. and Brantley, J. (2019) The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Minfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance. New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Canada: Oakland.
Stivale, C. J. (2005) Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Acumen. United Kingdom: Chesham.
Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso. United Kingdom: London.