The reach and intensity of globalization is now more ascendent than ever as increasing aspects of our lives make their way online. So, it’s no surprise that a section of the art world has taken to the digital domain to explore its creative, informative, and financial possibilities, in the form of NFT’s (non-fungible tokens). New York based NFT artist Ziyang Wu, creates anthropomorphic cyber beings and fever dream-like realities - depicting social phenomena. Wu explores the possibilities of the NFT community in eliminating certain hierarchical and elitist aspects of the current art world, whilst criticizing and questioning societies current structures and practices in his own work.

Seeing the rise in notoriety of NFT art in the last few months, how has this affected the reach of your work?

It definitely increased the reach of my work, both in the NFT community and contemporary art community, giving the fact that more and more people start to get interested in born-digital works.

It has also been a new and interesting experience getting more involved in the NFT community, which doesn’t really have many overlaps with the contemporary art community (although it starts to get more overlaps now). For example, my first NFT collector has never collected an artwork before haha. I’m also very inspired by this community where artists, creative developers, curators, collectors, people from the tech world and many more are regularly having community-based meetings and events on Discord, Clubhouse, VR Chat, IRL environments, and of course, airdrops! I’m also very inspired by various DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). I believe it will further bring people together and hopefully eliminate the hierarchies that often exist in the traditional art world.

How did you make the transition from traditional art to the digital medium?

I’m from a Fine Art background and received my BFA at Florence Academy of Fine Art (2009-2014) and MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (2014-2016). While my undergraduate and graduate degrees have been in the specialization of painting, I have also made sculpture, video, performance, and in recent years, 3D animation, AR, interactive installation and AI simulation. I grew up in the context of significant cultural change and the development of the Internet. The conflict between the old and the new accelerated my wide-ranging exploration. I am always dissatisfied by a single visual form and seek to include different elements in my works such as technology, drama and visual samples from different cultures. I believe that the era of globalization should have a particular discourse of its own, which is bonded with cultural communication and interactive media. Hence, this transition feels quite natural to me.

Your work has an incredibly immersive effect on its audiences. Do you utilize your art as a form of escapism?

Thanks for your compliment! However, I don’t utilize my art as a form of escapism. On the contrary, all my works are quite socially engaged. In my opinion, an artist is someone that ask critical questions that exists in our society through a certain approach (criticism, re-constructing, bringing awareness, etc.), using a certain medium (music, poetry, film, theatre, activism, science, fine arts, etc.), in a certain context (geographical, cultural, political, sociological, etc.). At the same time, solving a problem is just as important as asking questions, even though it might not be what an artist is good at (For example, scientists and politicians have much more capabilities to solve problems than artists). While it is also crucial that artists pay their efforts to connect to or become the problem-solving entity. My recent practices focus how the virtual world, data and algorithm as invisible forces ubiquitously micro-alienates and reconstructs humans in our highly globalized and digitized post-Internet society, with the focus on topics such as “The Stack”, “Filter Bubble”, “Social Credit System”, and “Algorithm bias”.

Does the pandemic continue to be as much of an influence on your work now that we are returning to a version of normality?

Yes, I think so. The new virus variant that was announced today once again reminded us that the pandemic is far from over soon. Many of my focuses will still be centered around the pandemic’s effects such as the ever-increasing nationalism and racism globally.

Much of your work questions and challenges social phenomena. Are there any issues currently holding a space in your mind?

I’m currently working on a project that focuses on the Philippines’ ongoing ICT infrastructure (information and communications technology infrastructure and systems) development under its “Build Build Build” Initiative and China’s “One belt One Road” Initiative, and examines the evolution of the cloud networked societies in the developing world, as well as its ecological, geopolitical and social-cultural effects. The project is commissioned by the Media Lab at Times Art Museum in Guangdong, and will be premiered in the summer of 2022.

Do you believe the immersive effects of digital art enhance its ability to connect with audiences further than physical mediums?

I don’t think one has more capability to connect with the audiences further than the other one. It depends on how successful the work is.

I think sometimes the immersive effects could actually be distracting. For example, in a 360 interactive video installation powered by dozens of synchronized projectors or screens, the audiences’ attention might only be on the visual spectacle and the interaction, while the deeper concept behind it becomes harder to grasp because the visual and technological aspect is too “powerful”. As an art practitioner who works a lot with these mediums, I always try my best to be as thoughtful and careful as I can, and only use them when it’s conceptually needed.

Your work is a transport to dream-like realities. Have you ever experimented with lucid dreaming or taken ideas from your brains’ unconscious creations?

Interestingly, even though many of my works visually present dream-like realities, all the concepts and strategies of my projects are from rational thinking and examinations of social issues. I would like to use my project A Woman with the Technology (2019) to further explain:

By training an AI Chatbot whose “knowledge” equals my “knowledge”, and making an animated video based on the content this chatbot generated, A Woman with the Technology examines how an individual’s online experience becomes personalized by the Internet algorithm and creates the “filter bubble.” As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural and ideological bubbles.

The project started from a 3-month long recording of all my online experiences. A series of keywords that are closely related to my daily focus are selected and used as initial input on various media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. The keywords include censorship, surveillance, alienation, absurdity, Neo colonialism, post truth, trade war, Asian experience, 5G, artificial intelligence, mixed reality, K-pop, identity, among others. I log in to these media every day, and give likes, leave comments on the posts/videos I’m interested in. The daily searching experiences are screen-recorded and organized.

The data that were used to train the AI include all the captions from each post, subtitles from YouTube videos, as well as all the textual information generated from the images and videos using the image detection application. In this way, I was able to cover all the aspects of the information I collected (both textual and visual). After the AI Chatbot was trained, I Googled “How to write a film script”? It listed a series of questions that needed to be asked in order to write “a successful script”. I asked the AI Chatbot all the listed questions. It then generated a futuristic and dystopian film script and I made an animated video based on the AI-generated script.

What can you tell us about your latest NFT drop, the “24 panda” project?  How were you hoping for this to affect your audiences?

Compared to all my year-long projects, 24 Panda is a small experiment, which started from a selection of 24 free 3D panda models on Sketchfab (The world’s largest open-source 3D model platform). I then downloaded and placed them in a fantasy forest scene, which functions as a vehicle where we (24 panda creators and I) collectively "created" this wonderland experience.

In addition to the high-resolution video, the collector will also get a copy of the original videogame (The project was made with the game engine Unity), so she/he/they can experience the entire scene on her/his/their own computer. At the same time, 50% of the income will be divided by 24 and send back to every creator of the panda models on Sketchfab.

This project is inspired by my recent experience and observations of various crypto communities where they would collectively create projects (in a decentralized way, or close enough), collectively deciding what direction the community should go. Artists have been releasing free content all over the Internet for a long time, and their free labor has always been taken advantage of or ignored. I aim to use this project to share a spirit: Coming from the community, and eventually giving it back to the community.