Xiě Dòng Huà 寫動畫

Inspired by traditional Chinese landscape painting and informed by her study of ancient Chinese texts and contemporary neuroscience, Choy’s collection of animated works explore how aesthetic encounters with nature—real or depicted—can foster calm, cognitive restoration, and emotional resonance.

Neuroscience has identified childhood as a period of profound neuroplasticity. Recent research suggests that experiences of awe and wonder may help reopen these critical periods of growth and repair in the adult brain. Drawing on this insight, Choy’s imagined landscapes are designed to soothe and awaken—to function as meditative spaces where viewers may pause, breathe, and re-engage with the world from a place of renewed attention.

Choy’s collection of AI-assisted animations evoke fleeting moments of beauty and wonder—each a quiet invitation to shift the xin (心) - the Chinese concept encompassing both heart and mind. The visual language of these animations is deeply rooted in Chinese art history. The artist’s textual prompts are drawn from a deconstruction of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (1679), a foundational guide to classical Chinese aesthetics and technique. AI tools—DALL·E 2 and RunwayML—translate these prompts into painterly, dreamlike visions, animated into flowing scenes that echo the brushstrokes of ink on rice paper.

Each work bears two seals: the artist’s own signature and a rotated, colour-matched DALL·E 2 watermark—subtly acknowledging the digital medium and paying homage to the seal traditions of classical painting. In this way, the past and future coalesce: tradition is not abandoned, but re-imagined through the lens of technological experimentation.

Even in machine-generated art, there is a whispered homage to the natural world—to the truth of its significance, to Nature as both source and algorithm. These works are created not as a catalogue of memories in absence, but as a quiet prayer for preservation. They draw on the collective memory of our shared human reverence for nature, resisting the role of requiem and instead offering a voice for its survival—a gesture of care, continuity, and hope.