Sougwen Chung Brings a Live, Brainwave-Driven Scroll to Art Basel Hong Kong’s New Digital-Age Sector
Art Basel Hong Kong is inaugurating a new sector devoted to art shaped by contemporary technologies, and one of its most closely watched presentations will unfold in real time. Canadian-Chinese artist Sougwen Chung (b. 1985) is showing new works in the fair’s first-ever Zero 10 sector, dedicated to art of the digital age, anchored by a monumental piece that will be completed live during the event.
The centerpiece, “Recursion 0”, is a 10-meter scroll created with the help of brainwave data. Rather than arriving as a finished object, the work is designed as a public process: a drawing that materializes through a feedback loop between the artist’s body, her data, and the systems she has built to translate that information into mark-making.
Chung has been developing the idea of human-machine collaboration since 2015, well before generative AI became a mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her early research drew on neuroscience, computer vision, and human-computer interaction, but she has long resisted the language of “interaction,” which she sees as too transactional. “Collaboration,” she argues, better captures the stakes: mutual exchange, transformation, and the possibility of both promise and peril.
That premise has guided her ongoing D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation) series, a body of work that now spans multiple “generations” of machine partners. The project has appeared in contexts that range from museums to global convenings, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where the work entered the permanent collection, the National Art Center in Tokyo, and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Across these iterations, Chung returns to a set of recurring themes that feel newly urgent in an era of ubiquitous AI: authorship, value, concealment, and erasure. If a machine appears to share in the act of making, who is credited with the result, and why? For Chung, the question is less about replacing human collaboration than about testing the assumptions that structure our relationship to technology — what we imagine machines to be, and what we might become through them.
Her systems, she has said, do not possess agency in any mystical sense. Instead, they reflect human agency back to us: our choices, biases, and accumulated knowledge, refracted through sensors, data, and code. The “feedback” she receives from a machine collaborator is not verbal or emotional, as it might be with another person. It arrives as a differently embodied loop — rhythmic, recursive, and responsive to the parameters she sets.
In practice, that can mean drawing with decades of her own movement data, or building mappings triggered by alpha waves. The work’s conceptual tension is also personal: to create a machine collaborator, Chung has had to make herself machine-readable. Quantifying the self becomes a paradoxical route toward moving beyond it — an existential pressure she frames as increasingly universal.
The artist’s prominence in the broader cultural conversation has grown alongside the technology itself. Chung’s TED talk, “Why I Draw with Robots,” helped introduce her approach to a wide audience, and in 2023 she was named to Time’s inaugural Time100 AI list.
At Art Basel Hong Kong, “Recursion 0” positions that long-running inquiry inside a fair context that is explicitly making room for digital-age practices. The live completion of the scroll underscores what Chung has been arguing for years: that the most consequential terrain may not be “human” or “machine” as fixed categories, but the charged space between them — where collaboration, risk, and new forms of expression take shape.
