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“Creative Machine” makes its Chinese debut at the Taikang Art Museum on November 15, 2024. The exhibition brings together Tang Xin, Artistic Director of Taikang Art Museum; William Latham, digital art pioneer and professor at Goldsmiths, University of London; and senior curator Zhou Yi as co-curators. AI scientist Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie serves as academic director, and artist Han Yajuan as the exhibition consultant. The exhibition runs until February 28, 2025.

“Creative Machine” is an international large-scale exhibition focusing on AI, robotics, computer art, and creativity, aiming to explore the “twilight zone of human/machine creativity”. Since its London debut in 2014, the exhibition has traveled to prestigious venues, including the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford, before making its way to Beijing, China, this winter. This marks not only the exhibition’s Chinese premiere but also represents one of Beijing’s first major showcases of creative AI and robotic art.

In recent years, AI has dominated headlines and sparked global conversation. The future of human-machine relationships continues to fascinate the public. Questions like “Can AI truly match human creativity?” resonate with many visitors. To help viewers understand the relationship between humans and machines while tracing the evolutionary path of AI in art, this exhibition explores AI and digital art creation from a global perspective, featuring works by 30 international artists and collectives across diverse domains, including AI, generative art, robot, and virtual reality.

The exhibition unfolds across three independent units: “Historical”, “Education” and “Contemporary”. The “Historical” section chronicles digital art pioneers and their seminal works from the 1950s through the late 1990s, while the “Contemporary” section presents cutting-edge installations, projections, and works by renowned international and Chinese artists working in robotic art, interactive AI, and computer vision. The “Education” section provides both an accessible introduction for newcomers and deeper insights into generative art and algorithm design for more knowledgeable visitors.

Creative “Spark”:

“Decisive Moment” of AI Art

Gather Cutting-Edge Works Worldwide, Offer an Immersive Sensory Adventure

The exhibits creates a sensory “experience field” that both shocks the senses and heals the body and mind, all the while immersing the audience in the charm of digital art. The interactive installation artwork Human Study #1 by French artist Patrick Tresset resembles a robotic arm that observes the audience on-site through a camera and designs portraits for them. Chinese artist Han Yajuan’s VR game work Cyber JiangHu constructs a speculative future world with techno-pink and plush materials. Viewers can “step into” an immersive virtual interactive environment by wearing an Apple Vision Pro. Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter’s work Superradiance combines AI with dance and neuroscience research, allowing audiences to experience the restorative power of digital art as if they were in a wonderland. The exhibits include media such as computer painting, interactive installation, and AI intelligent imaging, creating an immersive, interactive, and entertaining experience for audiences of all ages. As curator William Latham stated, “It’s not necessary for the audience to have any prior knowledge. It is accessible. People can just turn up. You don’t have to be an expert.”

Encounter “Prometheus”:

History of AI Art

Six Decades of Creative Innovation Condensed into One Extraordinary Journey

While visitors surround themselves with contemporary AI art, they embark on a journey through time, experiencing firsthand the evolution of digital art. Building on Taikang Art Museum’s attention to “media,” this exhibition starts with new technologies and their impact on art. While presenting the cutting-edge dynamics of AI art, it connects a miniature history of digital art from the perspective of media archaeology. “Historical” and “Education” showcase the 60-year evolution of global computer art from its nascent beginnings to today’s AI era. By tracing the journey and representative works of digital artist pioneers across various eras, the exhibition encourages audiences to observe the process and future of digital art from a new perspective.

Stepping into the gallery, visitors encounter pioneers in digital art history: John Whitney Sr, “the father of computer graphics”; Vera Molnar, “the mother of computer art”; Benoit Mandelbrot, “the father of fractal geometry”; Harold Cohen, creator of AARON, the first AI art system; Craig Reynolds, a pioneer of 3D animation in film. Like modern-day Prometheus figures, these visionaries have passed the torch of innovation across six decades, bringing the creative spark of AI to China and illuminating pathways to future creativity.

Exhibition insights:

“By providing links between yesterday and today, we offer glimpses of tomorrow. I hope it can inspire teenagers in particular, for they are the ones facing future challenges.” (Curator Tang Xin)

“This is a time, a great opportunity, great innovation, new algorithms being developed the whole time. For young creatives or any creative, this is a really brilliant time to be, creating art or writing software.” (Curator, William Latham)

“Does AI truly possess creativity? Can the emotions generated by machines move us as profoundly as great art?” (Curator, Zhou Yi)

“What will the next generation create in the future? Remember, humanity’s unique gift is our endless capacity to expand our creativity.” (The academic host Frederic Fol Leymarie)

About Curator:

Tang Xin

Head of Art Collection of Taikang Insurance Group, Art Director of Taikang Art Museum Curator. Graduated from the Tianjin Technology University in 1990, as an active curator in Beijing since 1997, Tang Xin curated a series of contemporary art exhibitions locally while establishing artistic exchange with Europe. In 2003, she joined Taikang Insurance Group, and founded and served as director of Taikang Space until the present, an art institution known as one of the most vital non-profit art organization in China. At the same time, as the art collection manager of the Taikang Insurance Group, she has made it into a leading corporation collection in the field in terms of scale and historical importance in over two decades period.

Tang Xin has closely followed the development and spread of modern and contemporary art in China since the 20th century. She links the art wave of the socialist revolutionary period with contemporary art, establishing a distinctive and systematic research approach within the Chinese contemporary art world. Additionally, she has contributed to the fields of photography history, the study of female artists, and the discovery and support of emerging art creators. During the inaugural exhibition of the Taikang Art Museum in 2023, Tang and her team introduced a Taikang research system, which integrates a historically significant framework, marked by the years “1905-1942-1976-present,” with 1905 as a key milestone, and the three central themes of “institution, media, and art ecology”.

About the Taikang Art Museum

Founded by Taikang Insurance Group, Taikang Art Museum (TAM) is a non-profit private art museum located at the core of Beijing CBD, dedicated to the research and collection of contemporary Chinese art. The acronym Taikang Art Museum (TAM), pronounced tā men, refers to the creators and appreciators of art, which echoes the concept of the museum's brand, “an art museum for ‘TA’”, i.e. an open and altruistic art platform that serves everyone’s understanding and pursuit of art. This echoes the museum’s brand concept of “a museum for ‘TAs’”, an open, altruistic art platform for the public that serves everyone’s understanding and pursuit of art. In terms of academic positioning, it focuses on Chinese modern and contemporary art since the 20th century, as well as future-oriented new art, emphasizing viewing, researching, and collecting contemporary artworks from a historical perspective. We hope to sort out and present the relationship between Chinese art and the times over the past century, and reflect the magnificent history of modern China from the perspective of art, and hope to participate in and promote the future-oriented development of the arts.

As the predecessor of the Taikang Art Museum, Taikang Space was founded by Taikang Insurance Group (formerly Taikang Life Insurance Co., Ltd.) in 2003, and has received its continuous support. Taikang Insurance Group is the earliest financial enterprise in China to develop a contemporary art collection. Over the past twenty years, Taikang has dedicated itself to collecting Chinese modern and contemporary art and has initially established a collection of art with historical significance and scale. The collection focuses on early Chinese photography from the second half of the nineteenth century, modern Chinese painting, realist art, and other art forms since 1905, as well as nodal works of contemporary art since the Reform and Opening Up and the new art practices that have attracted the most attention, while at the same time emphasizing the collection and documentation of art archives from the corresponding historical periods. In addition to combining art historical research in the 20th century, the study also considers the historical connection between local contemporary issues and the development of globalization from the perspective of the development of mankind as a whole.

TAM (Taikang Art Museum) aims to become a representative museum of contemporary Chinese art and a publicized service platform. As a new institution with 20 years of academic deposit, we uphold an open and friendly attitude, work together with industry leaders to promote China’s contemporary art ecology, integrate art into public life, participate in Beijing’s urban cultural construction, and tell a good story of Chinese development with art.

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