My name is Zhou Yiyan and I’m a multidisciplinary sculptor originally from Shanghai, now based in Paris since 2007 at my studio which is located in Asnières-sur-Seine. My artistic journey delves into the intriguing forms of flint and the dynamic movements of the human body, expressed through clay modelling and intricate metalwork with brass and gold. I am captivated by the coexistence of opposites and the transformative power of materials, which I attempt to explore by blending the delicacy of clay with the strength of metal. In addition to sculpture, I create performance art that fuses dance, drawing, and music, capturing the fluidity and expressiveness of bodily movement.
Zhou Yiyan in her riverside studio boat
Can you share some details about your primary technique?
My primary technique for shaping my sculptures involves mass modeling with earthenware clay. When working with porcelain, I employ a method known as plate modelling using porcelain paper to construct the pieces. I also strive to enhance and embellish my creations with golden accents, achieved through the use of brass or gold.
Did you choose your medium or do you feel your medium chose you?
Great question! I would say it’s a bit of both. Initially, I was drawn to clay and then to metals for their ability to express contrasts and complements in my work. However, over time, I guess it feels as though these materials have chosen me in return, allowing me to explore and express my ideas more fully. The interplay of their delicacy and robustness, and the blend of warm and cool light, perfectly aligns with my artistic vision and creative approach.
Describe your work in three words.
Movement, contrast, and harmony.
Trois Grâces by Zhou Yiyan (black clay with brass stem, 2020, 18 x 30 x 8 cm)
What themes do you find yourself returning to in your work and why?
I often return to the themes like reflection, balance, and grafting—ideas that resonate deeply within me and that I strive to translate into my sculptures and performances. This is why I incorporate brass and bronze into my work. Before defining these themes, I focused primarily on the form of the sculptures themselves. Now, these themes allow me to delve into deeper concepts, adding extra dimensions to my work and enriching the artistic experience I aim to share.
What is the importance of movement in your work?
I naturally work with great emotion, often drawing in tandem with the movements of a dancer performing in front of me. When a particular drawing inspires me to create a model, I feel an inner turmoil that mirrors the dancer’s rhythm. Movement reflects the fluidity and constant transformation of life, adding a dynamic dimension to my sculptures and performances. It captures human energy and emotion, allowing me to explore the interactions and relationships between forms, materials, and space, thus enriching the depth and meaning of my work.
Draw in Movement by Zhou Yiyan (charcoal on paper, 2020, 42 x 29 cm)
Can you tell us a little more about how you convey these rich and complex emotions in your work?
I convey complex feelings and emotions, such as sensitivity, in several ways. A 15-minute performance with the public is an intense, concentrated and pure transmission of my emotions. During these performances, every movement and gesture is impregnated with my feelings, offering a direct and immediate experience. In drawing, I draw a lot, especially in movement, at the same time as the movements. My hands become the interpreters of my emotions, capturing the sensations and nuances of each moment. Sometimes I also express myself with poetic texts. Then I try to convey all these sensations in my sculptures. Sculpting tends to be the longest and most delicate process.
When did you realise you wanted to become an artist?
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to create. My passion for art and design has always driven me to pursue my craft as purely as possible, free from commercial compromises. However, I never explicitly thought, “I want to become an artist,” especially not while growing up. It wasn’t until I left my job in 2015 that I truly considered this path.
My primary goal was to immerse myself in my ideas, taking the time to realise them deeply and authentically. To achieve this, I isolated myself and worked non-stop. In this process, I felt like a fish returning to water—completely at ease, with ideas and thoughts flowing freely. This immersion brought me immense joy, the only true joy in my life.
I’ve never dwelled on the label of “artist”; instead, I focused on bringing my ideas to life. Now, gradually, I feel I’m becoming an artist, though it’s not something I rely on to structure my day.
Zhou Yiyan’s boat studio, featuring her friendly mascot. Can you spot them?
Share a defining moment in your artistic career.
The creation of my sculpture “Premier Dancing Woman” stemmed from a particularly powerful experience. One winter, I was drawn to a piece of flint on a beach, hidden under a much larger rock. I carefully removed it and placed it on another small rock facing the sea. Its shape resembled a flying dress, and as I photographed it, stories began to unfold in my mind—her story. Inspired, I immediately wrote the poem “Dancing Woman” and sketched her as you would a dancer you admire.
When I later sculpted her in clay, an overwhelming emotion swept over me. As my hands touched the clay, tears welled up in my eyes, and I thought, “I’ve found my family at last.” This sculpture became one of my first three, marking a significant milestone in my artistic journey.
Do you need any specific conditions in place to be creative? For example, lighting, quiet, or music?
Lighting and silence are very important to me. These conditions create an environment conducive to concentration and reflection, which is essential for releasing my creativity and fully immersing myself in my work.
How do you know when you’ve finished an artwork?
I often know that a sculpture is finished when it feels ‘alive’ in front of me. At this point, I stop altering its form and focus only on the finishing touches. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of intuition: the work speaks to me, and I sense that there’s nothing more to add or remove.
Let’s start by introducing our readers to yourself and your practice.
I am Miguel Ripoll, a writer and visual artist. I spend half of my time coming up with instructions and berating machines, and the other half of my time turning those instructions into large complex images through a process that combines both manual intervention and physical, centuries-old printing methods and materials. I am also a humanist, because the entire process is human-driven, based on my own unique human consciousness, and because I do believe in in humanity–as terrifyingly flawed as it sadly is–and its inexhaustible capacity for transcendence, imagination and progress.
Vis Humana (from the series “Unreliable Heroes”) by Miguel Ripoll (Mixed digital media on hand-finished archival-grade Hahnemühle canvas 340 g/m2, 2023, 100 x 100 cm)
Fascinated by technology and art from an early age, I started experimenting with combinatorial algorithms and generative code (our grandfather’s AI) back in 1999–my early digital pieces (exhibited in major institutions like the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and the Cervantes Institute) are now in the permanent collection of the Design Museum in Barcelona–but became frustrated by the limitations of the very rudimentary technology available at the time and decided to pause artistic practice entirely.
For the following two decades, instead, I became an expert in the design and coding of data-driven digital interfaces for complex information systems, continuing to explore the creative possibilities of AI and algorithms in award-winning projects for global brands and top cultural institutions. My commercial work (digital, print, film, and theatre design) has been featured in books and magazines worldwide.
Since 2021, when I started testing early advanced Large Language Models like OpenAI and Midjourney, which allow me to do now with this new technology what I couldn’t achieve 25 years ago, I have been focusing on art-making and exhibiting my new work again. Patience and discipline, it seems, always pay off.
What is your primary technique and/or medium?
My practice combines iterative human-led AI adversarial dialogue (based on a custom dataset of texts, sound files, and pictures) with hand-crafted mixed digital media. I basically feed an LLM large quantities of preselected texts and images from a wide range of sources, and then push it to do exactly the opposite it has been trained to do: instead of regurgitating hyper-realistic or derivative visual detritus, I force it to “hallucinate” in ways I find coherent with what I am trying to achieve through language and repetition of subtly modified tasks. This takes quite a bit of arm-wrestling–hence the iterative, as in again, and again, and again, and the adversarial, as in pushing the boundaries to the extreme. The process typically produces hundreds of images, of which I sometimes use only bits or fragments.
These visual elements are then manually edited, digitally modified, combined and re-mixed by me, using various digital tools, into a single image. This image is giclée printed using archival ink on hand-finished museum-grade canvas. All other digital files are deleted, and only one physical object remains: a hybrid of centuries-old traditions and the latest technology, driven by a uniquely original human vision.
In a way, I would say my approach to working with AI is a mixture between lion tamer and special needs teacher, combined with a healthy dose of patience, curiosity and resilience in the face of technological adversity. Large Language Models are remarkably prone to messing things up, which in itself is not a bad thing necessarily, at least not when creating art.
What themes do you find yourself returning to in your work and why?
Most art throughout history can be reduced to the same few themes again and again: sex, power, loss, memory, love, regret, beauty, death, money, time. Human beings are quite predictable. Our life expectancy and living conditions are radically different now than, say, two centuries ago, but our concerns are remarkably similar both as individuals and as part of a community.
Because of the intrinsically different nature of my work–AI is, after all, a radically new technology, a first in human evolution–for the past few years, I have been concentrating on exploring the role ancient narratives (myths, legends, beliefs) play within the context of our contemporary anxieties about tech dystopias, societal inequalities, personal struggles, political division, and environmental degradation.
At the heart of these pieces, which question and subvert long-established themes and traditions of artistic praxis, is a recognition that our world has become fractured by tech and that the traditional frameworks of morality, religion, society, culture and art itself are no longer sufficient to navigate our increasingly complex, hyper-connected existence.
When did you start making art?
I wrote my first short story when I was two years old – I really cannot remember NOT being an artist, if by “artist” we mean someone who sees what doesn’t exist. In practical terms, I published my first book in 1996 and had my first exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid in 1999. This, might I add, was curated next to an iconic Picasso showcase, which didn’t help much with my imposter syndrome!
Share a defining moment in your career as an artist
This year marked a crucial turning point in my career. I realised that the work I had been experimenting with for the past few years closely aligned with my initial expectations and was essentially what I envisioned. Achieving satisfaction with my creations—a rare feat for me—and receiving recognition has been immensely rewarding.
I was selected for the European Union’s Creative Europe NMT PMP Program, which will feature workshops and exhibitions in several countries until 2025. Additionally, four of my pieces were showcased at this year’s CVPR Conference in Seattle, the premier international event in computer vision, sponsored by Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Apple. This exhibition was curated by Luba Elliott. Another highlight was having one of my pieces featured in Rise Art’s first online exhibition, “Kinaesthesia: Art in Motion.”
This extraordinary year will also bring exciting new exhibitions and an artist-in-residence program later in winter.
Has speaking several languages fluently influenced how you communicate through your art?
I can code in several artificial languages and have been “talking to machines” for over 25 years, so learning to interact with AI is not such a huge leap: I have found the transition quite organic. Something as basic as programming a website in HTML, CSS, JS and PHP is fundamentally only a series of instructions, of “prompts” that turn data into visual assets and behaviours. My previous formal education was humanistic and not technological at all–I was a writer and studied Literature and History of Art, something I believe was very influential in the formation of my world-view and character.
I don’t think, however, that art should be about communicating anything: that is the purview of the commercial designer, which I have happily worked as for a long time, as many great artists have done in the past too; from Leonardo da Vinci designing courtly feasts for Ludovico Sforza in 1490 to Francis Bacon designing furniture and rugs for the Royal Wilton Carpet factory in 1930.
As an artist, I refuse to convey a message: I am not here to lecture, to impart wisdom, to hector or virtue signal (which seems to be what most critically favoured art is about these days). My goal is to make people think, and dream, and feel. What they think, dream and feel is entirely their own business. I am merely a medium or a catalyst.
Artworks from the series “Unreliable Heroes” by Miguel Ripoll
Do you see art-making as a language?
I see it as a language that should not be immediately intelligible. If you can understand it straight away, it is not art but propaganda. Because art is a product of human consciousness, and we don’t really understand what human consciousness is or what exactly makes us human. I see what I do as a sort of cognitive alchemy, a sort of rationalised rite to understand who I am and, by extension, who we all are as a species. AI, being a non-human “intelligence” (note the inverted commas) that is conversant with the entire compendium of human activity throughout history, is the perfect assistant to distil the rarefied materials our feverish dreams and nightmares as a species are made of. In short, I am talking to myself–which is the ultimate goal, and the most universal: only by understanding oneself might one understand the world and humanity itself, and truly communicate with others.
Is there a specific project or idea you’re currently excited about?
The transformation of flat digital text into digital texture. In my work I do not try to mimic the texture of the paintbrush: I want my works to be recognisable by their unique digital texture—also very different from pixelation.
My AI-assisted art incorporates a unique form of digital texture—the texture of data. The algorithms that help me to generate these artworks are intricately structured, resembling complex digital weaves. The texture of the digital process, from the intricate code to the interplay of data points, becomes an essential part of the art’s identity, and it is very visible in its final form. Hence the large scale of my works, so that the intricate detail can be fully appreciated. This represents a novel form of texture that is native to the digital medium and an integral aspect of my AI-mediated art.
How do you know when you’ve finished an artwork?
True art is never finished because it is not trying to solve a problem. You cannot find the final answer, because art is not about the answer, but about asking the question. That is what I do, I ask questions, and then it is up to someone else (whoever looks at my work) to provide their own answers. So, an artwork is never finished because the question is always open. It is always: what do you see? In my practice, I stop when I look at an image and I cannot respond to that question myself: then I know the artwork is ready for other people to try and find their answer(s).
Do you see your work as building bridges between two stereotypically polar opposite industries? Technology and the arts?
Technology and art have always been intertwined. Throughout history, great artists have eagerly adopted the most advanced technologies of their time to evolve their practice. Dürer’s use of the printing press created a new medium for accessible, affordable art through printmaking. Leonardo’s pioneering scientific research opened new possibilities in pictorial technique. The invention of synthetic pigments in the 19th century enabled mass access to art making and revolutionised visual representation with movements like Impressionism, transforming our concept of what art could be. Photography also had a radical impact, decoupling art from mere reproduction of “reality” and challenging our understanding of both reality and art.
Whenever these new technologies emerged, elites—practitioners accustomed to the old ways, merchants, gatekeepers, critics—viewed them as threats to their status quo and existing privileges, and they pushed back. New technologies disrupt market dynamics and challenge established order, making them seem “dangerous.” Yet, they are also unstoppable: despite resistance, progress always ultimately prevails.
How could I not? I am working in the 21st century. What I do is part of a long tradition, and doesn’t happen in a vacuum: I am very aware of the past, so that I can be relevant to the present. I am an artist of my time, so I use the most advanced technology of my time. Otherwise, I would be an anachronism, and my art obsolete and irrelevant.
What astonishes me is how artists, critics, collectors and agents, can possibly still ignore art made with today’s technology (and even actively try to suppress or dismiss it): trying to stop progress is not only ridiculous and ignorant. It is inescapably self-defeating. In the end, it is all about knowledge and power: the unknown is always scary, a potential threat. Instead of fighting it, gallerists, critics and curators should learn about technology and even embrace it. A new connoisseurship is now needed to tell the wheat from the ever-abundant digital chaff.
What are you trying to communicate with your art?
Most of what is popular at any given time in history, especially today, is very obvious and facile, and doesn’t require any intellectual effort from the viewer: it is not art, but mere decoration. Art must question us and make us try harder to see what is not there. If you understand the thing immediately, what you are looking at is worthless. Art should be an unopened door to deeper human consciousness–you can either try to find the key or smash it open, both of which are rewarding, but require considerable energy and resourcefulness from the viewer. Curiosity and openness to look inwards are the keys to that door. Behind it we will find what makes us unique.
