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Sougwen Chung

Sougwen Chung (鍾愫君)
Born
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Education
OccupationArtist
Websitesougwen.com

Sougwen Chung (鍾愫君) is a Canadian-born, Chinese-raised artist residing in London who is considered a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration.[1][2][3] Chung's artistic practices are based on performance, drawing, still image, sculpture, and installation.[4] Through these media, the work investigates mark-made-by-machine and mark-made-by-hand for understanding the encounter of computers and humans.[5]

Early life

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Chung grew up in Toronto, Canada, and Hong Kong. Their father, an opera singer, made sure that his children had experience with musical instruments at a very young age, and Chung grew up playing violin and piano. Sougwen Chung moved to the United States as a teenager and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Indiana University Bloomington before obtaining a Masters Diploma in Interactive Art from Hyper Island in Sweden.[6]

Career

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Following their first exhibitions taking place in 2010-2014,[7] Chung began experimenting with drawing in collaboration with machines while a researcher at MIT Media Lab in 2015. This involved collecting two decades of personal drawings to train a recurrent neural network, later titled Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_1 (D.O.U.G._1).[3][8] The robotic arm's behaviour is generated from neural nets trained on the artist's drawing gestures.[9] In a sense, the robotic arm has learned from the visual style of the artist's previous drawings and outputs a machine interpretation during the human/robot drawing duet.[10] In 2016, the artist was awarded the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival for this work.[11][12]

Since then, the Drawing Operations series has continued to explore the interplay between human and machine mark-making, examining categories such as “human”, “machine”, “biological", "artificial,” and “intelligence” as evolving rather than fixed concepts.[3][8]

Chung is also an inaugural member of NEW INC, the first museum-led technology and art in collaboration with The New Museum.[6] According to the World Science Festival 2018, they are an Artist-In-Residence at Bell Labs exploring new forms of drawing in virtual reality, with biometrics, machine learning, and robotics.[13]

In 2019 Chung presented a talk at TED@BCG Mumbai titled "Why I draw with robots".[14]

In 2022, Chung's work MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_2) was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The acquisition of MEMORY comprises a fine art print, a film documenting the artist's process, and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model contained within a 3D printed sculpture.[15]

In 2023, as part of Bulgari's 'Serpenti: 75 Years of Infinite Tales' exhibition in Milan, Chung showcased LIFE / LINES, a multimedia sculpture crafted from real-time motion-capture data and rendered in large-scale 3D printed chrome, evoking the appearance of liquid mercury.[16]

On December 7, 2023, Chung contributed a guest essay titled "Where Does A.I. End and We Begin?" for The New York Times.[17]

In 2023, Sougwen Chung was named to the TIME100 AI list for their pioneering work combining painting and robotics.[18][19]

In January 2025, Sougwen Chung participated in a conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the World Economic Forum in Davos[20], in a session titled “What Happens When Humans and Robots Create Art Together?”, where they discussed human–machine collaboration in art and the role of AI in creative practice.[21]

Chung's work has been shown at galleries and museums across the world, including Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England,[22] EMMA in Espoo, Finland,[23] Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada,[24] MAMCO in Geneva[25] and der TANK in Basel, Switzerland,[26] ArtScience Museum in Singapore,[27] Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum in China,[28] TOM REICHSTEIN contemporary in Hamburg, Germany, [29] and Istanbul's Akbank Sanat,[30] among others.

Chung has spoken globally at conferences including Tribeca Film Festival, New York;[31] The Hospital Club, London; MUTEK Festival, Montreal & Mexico City; Sónar +D, Barcelona, The Art Directors Club, New York; Internet Dargana, Stockholm;[32] SXSW, Austin;[33] FITC Amsterdam & Tokyo;[5] OFFF, Barcelona; Gray Area Festival, San Francisco,[34] and SIGGRAPH, Vancouver.

Sougwen Chung's work has also been featured in multiple international press outlets including Art F City, Artnet, Artsy, Business Insider,[35] Dazed,[36] Designboom,[37] EXIT Magazine, Engadget, Fast Company, Forbes,[38] MASHABLE,[39] Noema Magazine,[40] Sursuma Magazine,[41] The Creators Project, The New York Times,[42] TIME Magazine,[43] USA Today,[6] Wired,[44] and Yishu.[45]

Selected works

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  • Praesentia Sculptures (2013) – 3D printed drawn sculptural prototypes printed in gold, made with custom software. Exhibited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab 2013. Currently, they are prototypes for a forthcoming series examining dimensional mark making.
  • Embryo (Étude OP. 5, No. 5) (2015) – Mixed media, commissioned by OFFF for OFFF Unmasked.
  • Mimicry (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1) (2015) – An ongoing collaboration between an artist and a robotic arm.[46]
  • Praesentia (2015) – "As a pencil moves about the paper, its path is local and confined; freed from the need to consider the totality, it can respond immediately to "where the hand is now in praesentia.".[47]
  • Memory (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2) (2017) – Performance involving robotic memory.[48]
  • Omnia per Omnia (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 3) (2018) – Collaborative drawing performance exploring the composite agency of an human and machine as a speculation on new pluralities.[49]
  • Exquisite Corpus (2019) – A performance installation exploring the feedback loop between bodies – the human body, the machinic body, and ecological bodies.[50]
  • Flora Rearing Agricultural Network (F.R.A.N.) (2020) – A performance and exhibition featuring the creation of a speculative blueprint for a new robotic network connected to nature.[51]
  • Assembly Lines (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 5) (2022) – A performative installation featuring a custom multi-robotic system driven by meditation and biofeedback.[52]

References

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  1. ^ Marletta, Donata (23 July 2013). "Organic Form and Digital Visions. An Interview with Sougwen Chung". Digicult. Retrieved 26 March 2017.
  2. ^ Thakkar, Avani (24 September 2024). "For Artist Sougwen Chung, A.I. Art Is Art and Technology Is Just Another Tool". Observer. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  3. ^ a b c Jebb, Louis (17 January 2025). "Sougwen Chung: meet the boundary-pushing pioneer of robot art". The Art Newspaper - International art news and events. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  4. ^ Noergaard, Ulrik (30 June 2011). "Sougwen Chung". Dazed. Retrieved 26 March 2017.
  5. ^ a b "Sougwen Chung". FITC. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  6. ^ a b c Shin, Nara (11 April 2014). "Charged: Sougwen Chung". Cool Hunting. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  7. ^ "Sougwen Chung – Artist Profile (Photos, Videos, Exhibitions)". AIArtists.org. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  8. ^ a b "Drawing Operations". MIT - Docubase. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  9. ^ "Sougwen Chung – Artist Profile (Photos, Videos, Exhibitions)". AIArtists.org. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  10. ^ "Sougwen Chung – Art Gallery". nips4creativity.com. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
  11. ^ "Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1". JAPAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL (in Japanese). Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  12. ^ "Sougwen Chung Wins Excellence Award at Japan Media Arts Festival 2016". www.seditionart.com. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  13. ^ "Sougwen Chung". World Science Festival. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
  14. ^ "Why I draw with robots". TED Conferences, LLC. 25 November 2019. Retrieved 2 October 2021.
  15. ^ "The Algorithmic Gesture: Sougwen Chung's MEMORY • V&A Blog". V&A Blog. 14 December 2022. Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  16. ^ Serpenti Factory Milan: Bulgari x Sougwen Chung, 25 October 2023, retrieved 26 February 2024
  17. ^ Chung, Sougwen (7 December 2023). "Where Does A.I. End and We Begin?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 February 2024.
  18. ^ "TIME100 AI 2023: Sougwen Chung". Time. 7 September 2023. Retrieved 21 August 2025.
  19. ^ "The TIME100 Impact Awards". Time. Retrieved 21 August 2025.
  20. ^ "AI and robotics meet human creativity". World Economic Forum. Archived from the original on 18 May 2025. Retrieved 21 August 2025.
  21. ^ World Economic Forum – Annual Meeting 2025: What Happens When Humans and Robots Create Art Together
  22. ^ "Friday Late: Wild Digits - Drop-in at V&A South Kensington · V&A". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  23. ^ "Sougwen Chung: Assembly Lines". EMMA. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  24. ^ "The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence". Vancouver Art Gallery. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  25. ^ Kirn, Peter (11 June 2013). "Sougwen Chung's Chiaroscuro Installation Breathes with Light and Hand-drawn Imagery". CDM Create Digital Music. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  26. ^ "Sougwen Chung: BODY MACHINE (MERIDIANS)". Mesh – Festival für Kunst und Technologie (in German). Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  27. ^ ArtScience Museum (20 November 2018). SEPTEMBER 2018 FULL PERFORMANCE | ArtScience Late: Sougwen Chung. Retrieved 24 August 2025 – via YouTube.
  28. ^ "PROMTOSCAPE | Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum". www.minshengart.com (in Chinese). Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  29. ^ "Sougwen Chung: BODY MACHINE (MERIDIANS) › VRHAM". VRHAM (in German). 29 April 2025. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  30. ^ "NonSpaces". Akbank Sanat. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  31. ^ "TFI Interactive". Tribeca Film Institute. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  32. ^ Internetstiftelsen (24 November 2014). Keynote: Sougwen Chung - Internetdagarna 2014. Retrieved 24 August 2025 – via YouTube.
  33. ^ "Schedule". SXSW Schedule 2014. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  34. ^ "Sougwen Chung". The Gray Area Festival. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  35. ^ Saini, Shivam. "This robotic arm draws almost as well as a human artist — because it sort of is one". Business Insider. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  36. ^ Dazed (30 June 2011). "Sougwen Chung". Dazed. Retrieved 18 November 2019.
  37. ^ designboom, ravail khan I. (28 March 2023). "sougwen chung co-creates and meditates with multi-robotics through biosensors". designboom | architecture & design magazine. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  38. ^ Caballero, Ana María. "Web3 Travel Guides: Future Horizons, Art Dubai Digital And Beyond". Forbes. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  39. ^ Mashable (27 March 2016). This Artist Built a Robot to Draw with Her | Mashable Docs. Retrieved 24 August 2025 – via YouTube.
  40. ^ Gardels, Nathan (26 August 2022). "Introducing Noema Issue III: Rupture". Noema Magazine.
  41. ^ "Magazine- Sursuma | Sursuma%". sursuma. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  42. ^ "Where Does A.I. End and We Begin? (Published 2023)". 7 December 2023. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  43. ^ CHOW, ANDREW R. (7 September 2023). "Sougwen Chung". TIME. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  44. ^ Stinson, Liz. "What Artists Can Teach Us About Making Technology More Human". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  45. ^ "Browse Articles | Yishu Online". Retrieved 24 August 2025.
  46. ^ "Drawing Operations (2015) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)". Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  47. ^ "sougwen". Sougwen. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
  48. ^ "Drawing Operations (2017) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)". Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  49. ^ "Omnia per Omnia (2018) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)". Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  50. ^ "Exquisite Corpus (2019) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)". Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  51. ^ "F.R.A.N. Flora Rearing Agricultural Network (2020) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)". Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  52. ^ "Assembly Lines (2022) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)". Retrieved 10 January 2023.
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