“I have always loved painting, but because of my own temperament, I find it difficult to sit still and complete a canvas. This has led me to search for a more efficient way of making a painting. Through the use of artificial intelligence and 3D printing, my approach has shifted from how to paint a picture to how to control a picture. By “control,” I mean organizing and composing images through the vast resources embedded in AI databases that contain the history of human painting.”

Piero Atchugarry Gallery is please to present “Bipolar Disorder” in the United States by Li Hanwei (b. 1994 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China), curated by Stavroula Coulianidis. The exhibition features five largescale paintings generated through a combination of artificial intelligence and 3D printing technologies. By experimentating with advanced new tools, Li confronts the history of painting, power dynamics between human and machine and impact cultural psychology has in the digital age. In the era of AI, images are constantly generated, replicated, and recombined within databases. Creation has shifted from independent manual labor to an algorithm-driven “loop.” Li Hanwei’s work pushes this notion to the extreme – manipulating over a dozen 3D printers and repeatedly outputting AI-generated images. Through multiple transfers, layers, destruction and repair, he wears away the “perfect” computational traces into material images with all its cracks and imperfections.

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