Around 2020, I became fascinated by phenomenology. My earliest research began with a series of unusual experiences. I started to imagine time and space as separate bubbles, each centered around the perception of “I” The light, smell, and texture of the present moment form a complete bubble. When a person experiences something beyond ordinary bodily function — such as a near-death experience, the splitting of the body in dreams, or the reorganization of the senses under a hallucinatory state — they may slip into a different bubble.

This led me toward mysticism. I came to understand it as a method of perception and thought. Later, I took courses in mysticism at the University of Amsterdam, where I encountered the symbolic systems of alchemy, the imagery of tarot, and medieval herbal hallucinatory practices. I have a tarot deck specifically for divining my works. The images on the cards are highly abstract, and the booklet that explains them reads like a fragmented novel.

Whenever my inspiration comes to a halt, I draw a card to set my thoughts in motion again. When you gaze at the image on the card and allow it to collide with your present consciousness, a connection you could not have foreseen begins to emerge from that gap.

When I was researching film in Cambridge, I realized that the screen was the liminal space I had always been searching for. It belongs neither entirely to reality nor entirely to the virtual; rather, it is a breathing membrane between the two. In ancient times, people would gaze into fire and enter a state of meditation, slipping into the fissure between wakefulness and trance. Gradually, I began to understand the screen as a psychic field, a space of spiritual transmission.

The generative syntax of AI carries within it a certain dreamlike drift. You give it a prompt, and what it returns is never exactly what you expected. I began to treat AI as a co-conspirator. I offer it symbolic seeds: the reversed Death card in tarot, Agamben’s nymph, a ghost signal on a midnight screen. AI then drags them into a generative process that I can never fully control. Within that process, blocked energies, temporal dislocations, the body’s self-fracturing, and the spiral return of memory begin to appear, frame by frame, from the black box of the algorithm.

I have always existed in a state of floating. From China to London, from London to Cambridge, and from Cambridge back to Shanghai, my life has remained in motion. Perhaps it is as Lacan describes: the object of desire must always remain unreachable. It is as if one is forever on the way to a distant destination. This instability has shaped my work. My practice is drawn to the creation of a field—an alchemical, ritualistic space. Viewers enter with their own conscious or unconscious states, encountering, entangling with, and reweaving them through the screen-based image. Like facing a tarot card alone, no one can give you the answer. Meaning can only gradually emerge from the collision between your own consciousness and the symbol.