Preface

Breaking Boundaries is a contemporary experimental exhibition grounded in cross-disciplinary inquiry. It engages with one of the pressing questions of our time: In an era marked by rapid global technological advancement, can art catalyze technological leapfrogging? As cross-domain practices emerge as a defining paradigm, how do creators articulate their languages of making? And are we approaching a moment of paradigm shift in how transformation itself is conceived?Situated in Shenyang, China—an emerging hub of intelligent urban development—the exhibition positions art as a medium for dialogue with new quality productive forces, juxtaposing intelligence with aesthetics, and weaving technology into the fabric of culture. Beyond offering a multisensory experience, it presents a speculative vision of humanity’s future.Breaking Boundaries assembles a cohort of leading cross-disciplinary creators from across the globe: engineers operating at the intersection of architecture and media, researchers integrating intangible cultural heritage with digital innovation, artists synthesizing computer science and design, and experimental teams applying engineering technologies within the realm of dance. Drawing from their distinct domains, these practitioners reconfigure the relationship between art and technology within overlapping contexts, activating new modes of production and reimagining the ethos of creation itself.In many ways, the exhibition responds to the question of how transformation and innovation take place. Technological change demands courage—the courage to push beyond established boundaries. Cultural innovation calls for vision—a vision that embraces diversity and connects across global perspectives. Experimental exploration requires accumulation—a quiet dedication to practice, refinement, and excellence over time.Ultimately, Breaking Boundaries is both a grasp of new opportunity and a timely response to the spirit of a new era.

Spatial Nodes is a digital-physical framework that leverages tactile interaction to embed information into everyday objects, allowing a person's presence, touch, and memories associated with physical space to be revisited. Another person can either trace these past interactions and thoughts or engage in live remote collaboration through the same objects.

We aim to address the gap between the current trends of robotic interfaces and programmable materials by critically rethinking what is already readily available to users. Instead of relying on additional microcontrollers or invasive modifications. This project challenges the notion that tangible interaction must require new electronic components or engineered materials. Our approach demonstrates how tactile engagement itself can become a medium for encoding and accessing memories and information.

This work is a collaborative project by Maggie Chao, Jin Gao, Alexander Htet Kyaw, Yifei Li, Melody Yao, Yudian Xu, and Keyi Zhang.

Medium: Digital Media Video

This artwork expands on embodied cognition and material engagement through motion-tracking technology. It invites audiences to interact with the piece using embroidery-inspired gestures—palm presence, grasping, swaying, pinching, and stitching—mirroring the hand-eye-mind coordination inherent in textile artisanship. These movements dynamically shape generative imagery, visualising embroidery’s cognitive and meditative aspects as a process of continual transformation.

Medium: Interactive installation (generative digital imagery, real-time motion tracking, and projection on digitally printed textile)

Carto, a seamless blend of maps, notes, and a timeline function designed to enhance personal and creative documentation. With this app, you can easily search for or tap to add a meaningful place-mark on the map and write notes at that specific location. Each note can be tagged with a date, transforming it into a chronicle of your experiences. Whether you’re capturing personal memories, documenting historical events, or crafting creative stories, Carto provides a unique and engaging way to map your world and time. Explore, document, and relive your moments with our dynamic map-note-timeline integration!

Medium: Apps, Concept Video

Derung Daughter is a narrative video installation that immerses viewers in the world of the Derung women, an indigenous ethnic group in China known for their ancient facial tattoo rituals. These tattoos, seen as marks of beauty, were also acts of resistance—believed to protect the women from outside raiders by making them less desirable. The work explores the feminine interplay of visibility and erasure, power and vulnerability. Derung Daughter meditates on cultural memory, inherited pain, and the subversive strength embedded in acts of refusal, inviting viewers to witness a story both intimate and veiled.

Medium Digital Media Video, Sculpture (Plastic)

This experimental moving image work, combined with guided meditation, is inspired by the artist’s own extrasensory experience. Language serves as a medium to replicate this ineffable state with minimal loss. The piece invites viewers to enter a space beyond the five senses, exploring the boundaries of consciousness and unfamiliar layers of perception. Participant AI model: RunwayML, WOMBO art, Disco Diffusion.

Medium: Single-channel video

Genesis is an animated short film which aims to tell queer stories about unique journeys to love and parenthood created by Iuliia Fedorova (@spicyjuliaa) and Mariia Timoshenko (@mt.desiiign). It explores how imaginary worlds and collective narrative building form the environment of mutual support and play. Each of the characters was created through collaboration and conversation during several storytelling workshops, where participants sculpted with plasticine and designed story quests that reflected on their experiences as queer people. Then these characters were brought to life in the digital world which allowed them to feel, sound, and move in their special way, where they could be non-human, bright and weird.

Medium 3D animation, digital art

For 30 days, I challenged myself to document my dreams using Leonardo.Ai, dedicating around 20-25 minutes each day to translate vivid, cinematic dreamscapes into visual stories. Like Netflix's homepage, each tile in this project represents a unique, larger-than-life narrative, carefully recreated from the subconscious.

I created this project to prove that creative blocks are often illusions. Having maintained a dream journal since my early teens, I’ve always had an abundance of raw, original ideas. By combining persistence with clear, descriptive prompting and focusing on shot composition, lighting, subjects, and emotions, I shaped my dreams into visual concept art using only Leonardo.Ai’s free daily quota.

Medium: Digital Media, AI Generation

Track Me Here reimagines urban navigation through a series of 1km journeys from different starting points. Exploring how time, purpose and location affect the imperical notion of measurement and shape our spatial experience. Each route is documented and transformed into box sets, offering a personal, time-based remapping of the city.

Medium: Laser-cut, Wooden Box

This research explores the transformative potential of digital storytelling as a medium to bridge the emotional and cultural disconnect between cultural heritage artifacts and audiences. By leveraging immersive narratives, interactive media, and emotionally resonant storytelling techniques, this research aims to reanimate the voices of artifacts—such as looted relics, displaced sculptures, and forgotten treasures—transforming them from static museum exhibits into dynamic storytellers. Through their stories, these artifacts express their histories, struggles, and longing for their origins, fostering a profound sense of empathy and connection among viewers. tool, but as a catalyst for cultural empathy, justice, and preservation.

Medium Immersive Experimental Filming

In this digital video work, forms appear like dreams and bubbles—growing, intertwining, and fading instantly. Inspired by neural structures and foam, it explores the fleeting nature of thought. Drawing on Buddhist ideas such as illusion, non-attachment, and ksana—a brief moment where all arises and fades—this piece visualizes the intangible nature of 念 (nian, thought). You Lee continues to explore how Buddhist philosophy informs contemporary visual art. The shifting visuals invite viewers to reflect on how thoughts form and change, offering a quiet meditation on the mind’s impermanence.

Medium： Digital Media Video

A traveller moves through the vast emptiness, heading toward a silent industrial tower. In the centre, a swinging pendulum moves without stopping, like a machine that keeps the rhythm of the universe. Its steady beat turns into a glowing fabric of energy, shaped by invisible magnetic lines, gently rippling through broken signals. As the tower replies with flickering lights and moving shadows, a quiet conversation begins across different worlds. Beneath the strict order, the universe’s energy starts to whisper like a playful child, asking deep questions about existence, in the middle of starlight and loneliness.

Medium Digital Media Video

’Lost Moments’ references German scholar Walter Benjamin's description of "wanderers" as people who wander through the city but can touch the emotional texture better than anyone else. This body of work arose from the realization that I might be facing some emotional backlash from leaving London, and I began to look out for isolated, wandering, unnoticed spaces in the city that echoed my state of mind. With low saturated colors and static compositions, I collage everyday elements to present the quietness and flow of the theme Escape from the Everyday. This set of drawings mimics the style of ink drawings, with variations in line outlining symbolizing the silence and flow in my emotions. ’Silhouettes in the Wilderness’ was shot in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. The silhouettes of horses and shepherds in the work are surrounded by boundless snow-capped mountains, grasslands, and lakes. These vast landscapes are both the wilderness of freedom and the track that cannot be broken free. A barbed wire fence deliberately set up in the picture becomes the most direct metaphor for this contradiction - the horse cannot break away from the control of the shepherd, just as the shepherd cannot escape from his social identity and duties. Barbed wire is not a barrier, but a more complex connection that takes the notion of Hometown beyond mere belonging to a gentle bondage.

Medium: Photography

"Monica" headphones & online dance community design A head movement tracking headset is designed for dance enthusiasts, and an integrated online dance community software is developed to match it. Users can generate their own dance rhythm information by recording the head movement curve during dance, and generate artistic expression effects exclusive to users. At the same time, users are allowed to communicate with each other's rhythm in the community, and combined with spatial audio technology, they can share the rhythm feeling of dance remotely.

Medium: Headphones Products, Online Community, Concept Video

This moving image work begins with the scientific discovery that the placenta was given to us by ancient viruses, and from there, it reexamines the relationships between mother and child, family, and between viruses and humanity. It encourages a reconsideration of concepts we take for granted in daily life, such as self/other and friend/enemy. Central to the concept is a poetry reading inspired by scientific knowledge. Abstract visuals and soundscapes evoke emotions, drawing the viewer in. This work aims to provoke a hope for new love and new relationships among "alien" entities, providing an experiential answer to the research question.

Medium Digital Media Video

This art suitcase transforms the collector’s global journey into physical evidence of civilizational evolution. As a time capsule crossing the boundaries of traditional art, each hinge and seam suggests the possibility of dimensional rupture. It serves as a miniature archive of civilization: – Matter: atomic alignment paintings – Energy: 11-dimensional superstring visuals from plasma-art-tech collisions – Information: data paintings shaped by global audience consciousness Final question: If this suitcase tunnels between the Louvre and CERN, is collecting simply civilization seeking its higher-dimensional self?

Medium: Installation Art

Using a projector to project on a wall, with a screen in front of the wall as a medium to give the effect of overlapping shadows between the wall and the screen, there can be cushions nearby for people to sit down and take their time to enjoy the experience, or there can be a raised platform for people to rely on to stand and watch.

Medium Digital Media Video