Ziyao Lin (b. 1999) is an artist and researcher working across installation, moving image, and AI-based artistic practice. Her work explores how technological systems can both alleviate and intensify the scarcities of contemporary life. Combining autoethnography with media experimentation, she is interested in what is missing, neglected, or emotionally impoverished in a world shaped by acceleration and technological abundance. Her work does not offer solutions, but asks: in a world rich in technology, what becomes scarce?

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I am an artist and researcher whose practice spans installation art, moving image, and AI-based artistic practice. My work moves between artistic creation and critical inquiry. I see art as a way of thinking through the contradictions of lived experience: visibility and erasure, technological abundance and scarcity, narrative and silence, among others.

I studied Digital Media Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China for my undergraduate degree, and later completed a master’s degree in Digital Media at Goldsmiths, University of London in the UK. I am currently a PhD candidate working in the field of art and technology.

Who or what are your biggest influences, both artistically and personally?

I think different artists and scholars have influenced me in different ways, to varying degrees. For me, it is not really a matter of having one single greatest influence. Rather, each person and each experience has its own distinct qualities and contributions. It is the accumulation of these different inspirations that has shaped who I am today.

From some artists, I have learned from their formal approaches. From others, I have been influenced by their ideas and conceptual frameworks. From certain scholars, I have learned ways of thinking critically, while others have shown me particular angles from which to approach a problem. These influences are diverse and layered.

On a personal level, lived experience has also had a profound impact on me. My background has made me especially sensitive to questions of scarcity, absence, and structural inequality. Personal experience often becomes an entry point through which I explore broader social and cultural contexts.

Autoethnography plays a role in your practice. How does your personal experience become a site of research within your work?

In my work, personal memories, emotions, and everyday experiences often serve as research material. They help me explore how larger structures are internalized and felt. This means that many of my artistic and research inquiries begin with myself. Sometimes, individual experience feels like a stone, and making art is like throwing that stone into the lake of society, creating ripples and generating resonances with others. It begins with the self, then extends outward toward relationships with others, with the world, and with society. It is a process of expansion from the inside out.

What interests me is not self-expression for its own sake, but the way personal experience can reveal broader social conditions that are otherwise difficult to grasp. For me, autoethnography is one possible method of transforming lived experience into a critical perspective.

One work in which I very explicitly adopted an autoethnographic methodology is Archive 2023. This project began with the idea of an AI archive, which I documented over the course of several months. I tried to present my daily conversations, practices, and life with ChatGPT through visually rich informational imagery. These fragmented records reveal both the possibilities and the potential problems of artificial intelligence. AI may appear to be a vast and coherent system of intelligence, yet it is manifested through the lives and experiences of countless separate and seemingly insignificant individuals.

The archive intertwines memory and truth, blurs the boundary between the private and the public, and reflects on AI as one of the defining topics of 2023. It examines how AI gradually entered public visibility, began to shape people’s behavior, and raised questions about how human beings may coexist with AI technologies in the future.

You describe your work as engaging with what is missing or emotionally impoverished. How do you approach and explore these forms of absence within your practice?

I am often interested in what produces these forms of absence, or what causes our sense of impoverishment. In the process, I usually try to begin with something small, and then allow it to reflect a larger condition.

For example, I have a work titled Drifting Poetry. It began with a long-term feeling of drifting in both life and society. I connected this feeling to a sense of groundlessness and rootlessness. Later, I created a two-meter installation using visual elements associated with floating as a metaphor, in order to express and respond poetically to this kind of directionless drifting.

There is also an earlier work titled Love Letters Without the Recipient. It is a machine that generates love letters in vain, telling a story about how people project their emotions onto generative AI.

What I often pursue is tension rather than resolution. I am drawn to what remains incomplete, damaged, or difficult to articulate, and I want to explore what this incompleteness can tell us about the world that produced it.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

I think the challenges I have faced as an artist have come from many different directions. Some involve how to balance the time and energy required for both practice and theory within research. Some are very practical, such as how to find a place for myself as an emerging artist. Then there are also more familiar questions: how to face failure, how to deal with rejection, how to live with self doubt, how to develop a visual language, and how to build a research framework.

I would not say that I have fully overcome these challenges. Much of the time, I am simply trying to live and work alongside them. I have gradually come to accept that difficulty and challenge are inevitable parts of the process.

Perhaps uncertainty and failure can themselves become meaningful conditions for both artistic practice and research.

What role do you believe art plays in social and cultural change? 

I do not believe that art, by itself, can directly or effectively change society. However, I do believe that art can change the ways people perceive, feel, and understand the conditions in which they live. It can make structures visible, and it can give form to what is usually overlooked, ignored, or left unnamed.

For me, art matters because it can create disturbance and open up a space in which dominant narratives become less stable. It can slow down what has already been normalized, produce friction within systems of representation, and allow other kinds of experience to enter public visibility. This is especially important in an age when technological systems increasingly shape what people see, feel, and remember.

The power of art lies in the fact that it not only depicts social issues, but also shapes the perspective through which we encounter them.

Text and photo courtesy of Ziyao Lin

Website: https://www.ziyaolin.net/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziyao0/