Unfinished Perception I
A moving image series across Wuxing
video, 20 minutes, 2025
“Well done, badly done, not done — they’re all the same.”
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“Water nourishes all beings yet does not contend.” — Dao De Jing, ch. 8
“Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water, yet nothing surpasses it in overcoming the hard and strong.” — Dao De Jing, ch. 78
In this phase, water is not a backdrop, but an active participant in co-creation. It flows, reflects, dissolves, and resists form — always moving, always becoming. The work is composed as a triangular system between water, human, and AI. Rather than positioning AI as a tool or water as subject, this triangular relation becomes a field of recursive sensing.
Perception here is constructed rather than assumed. Water offers surface and movement; AI returns echoes, distortions, and artifacts; the artist mediates these exchanges. The process is fragile and porous — a loop in which clarity is always deferred.
There is no resolution, no final image — only invitation. The piece asks:
Can perception remain open, partial, and co-emergent?
What happens when we create not through command, but through attention?
This is not a closed narrative, but a choreography of responses — an unfinished perception becoming through others.
perception is my starting point and method. Water serves both as the originating element in Daoist Wu Xing and as the entry point for my work. I begin by simply observing the water’s basic form—its ripples, reflections, and flow. This first stage feels like a deep meditation, as if I’m opening a door to converse with the water itself.
Next, I film from outside the water, watching how the surrounding world projects onto its surface. This moment unsettles my fixed viewpoint: I start to wonder — ‘Are these reflections how water itself perceives the world, beyond what I see?’ My human perception begins to overlap with the water’s way of seeing.
Then, I submerge the camera and enter the water’s domain. Here, my senses are challenged even more — my sight blurs, light refracts, sounds change. I try to co-perceive with the water — not just observing it, but feeling how it shapes and resists my presence. This destabilizes my position as a single, controlling observer.
Exhibitions:
July 2, 2025 - July 9, 2025
13 Grattan St, #402, Brooklyn, NY, 11206
Moments of Grammatical Collapse
July 4, 2025 - July 11, 2025
ARCH 8 CRANLEIGH MEWS, BATTERSEA, LONDON, SW11 2QL
"Is incompletion itself a valid state of making?"
Unfinished Perception is a generative exploration of how sensing, responding, and meaning-making can unfold beyond the boundaries of the human. Inspired by the Five Phases (五行) — water, wood, fire, earth, and metal — the series invites viewers to experience perception not as something to be finalized, but as a living, recursive field of exchange between human, non-human, and machinic actors.
Each phase centers on a different element not as metaphor, but as co-creative force. Drawing from Daoist cosmology — including the idea of “生生不息” (endless generation) and “修无相生” (formless interdependence) — the project unfolds through partial alignments, unfinished loops, and open-ended time. In this sense, "unfinished" becomes not a lack, but a principle of possibility — echoing Robert Filliou’s Fluxus notion that incompletion is itself a valid state of making.