The Fifth Season

The idea of the ‘fifth’ season suggests the new seasons that we may come to know as our climate changes, while also referencing developments in technology.

In this exhibit the artist is exploring ways art can be used not only to communicate environmental issues, but also the potential of art to solve environmental problems.

YH 银瑚 (meaning ‘silver coral’) is an AI generated artwork that explores the issue of coral bleaching. 

By analysing the form and colours of coral reefs, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) creates a continually shifting, artificially imagined underwater landscape which begins to distort as humans approach.

If people get too close, the ‘coral’ begins to lose colour and bleach out . If the audience finds the right balance with the piece, the coral is able to recover - much as real coral is able to.

Latent Seasons is a series of paintings based on artificially generated images of nature. 

Here, each painting is based on an AI generated image of the seasons, along with a ‘fifth’ season imagined by a machine. The series is painted with a combination of different compounds that are able to remove pollution from the air. 

As such, each painting acts in the same way as a real plant or tree, and is able to clean the surrounding environment.

During the day, the UV reflective material would be largely invisible to human users of the building, but could be seen by birds.

At night, the UV pattern could be temporarily revealed by illuminating the building with the correct lighting. Buildings and cityscapes could be transformed by the patterns and colours previously invisible during the day.