Che-Yu Wu 吳哲宇

Between January and April 2010, in his last term of junior high school, Che-Yu Wu wrote a program called Evolution. On the screen a crowd of small circles chases food. Each creature carries a string of text-editing commands as its genes; eating teaches it a new command at random, and when it reproduces it passes commands on to its offspring. The program feeds the two letters “ff” through every newborn’s commands, and if the result is on his list of words, it logs a success. Across thirty-seven experiment folders the results file holds thirty-two successes, and the word that evolved most often was fun. His own English name, frank, was also on the list. It never evolved.

If you make DNA digitally, and it can mutate or be inherited, could it produce … the feeling of digital life that has come alive that way?

Che-Yu Wu on the podcast AI 練功場, 2026 (translated)

He kept writing that line through high school. In 2011 he wrote Conway’s Game of Life and Brain, a network of ten thousand neurons. In Evolution 2012, written with a classmate, each creature’s DNA became four thousand letters of A, T, G and C, whose fragments decide resistance to heat and cold, predation, poison and antidote, in an environment with temperature, oxygen and carbon dioxide; he also wrote his nickname, MAJER, into a stretch of “plug-in DNA” that strengthens every creature carrying it. Evolution Revolution (2013) let creatures’ traits rise and fall with time. In the same years he mixed stop-motion, Flash and every other technique he knew into short films and entered the Acer Digital Innovation Awards five years running, from the fifth edition to the ninth, winning first prize four times. In 2011, in his first year of high school, Touch New Future took both first prize in the general high-school category and the jury’s Super Grand Prize.

In 2013 he began electrical engineering at National Chiao Tung University (now National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University), graduating in 2017. As a student he started taking commissions, first as design work for student organisations in 2014 and from 2015 under the name Monoame Interactive Design, later building interactive websites and experiences for the National Palace Museum, Nissan, Rémy Martin and the Taipei Metro. In 2016 he launched his first online course on Hahow.

Electrical engineering, he recalled on INSIDE’s Side Chat podcast in 2025, was the subject his family saw as having a future. “After graduation I didn’t want to go into the science park, so I ran away, and went to New York to study art.” In 2018 he began a master’s in Integrated Digital Media at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, and graduated in 2020.

In New York he worked as a teaching assistant for creative coding classes. His thesis was a tool for intuitive musical expression, the Intuitive Music Expression Tool. He also made EXPLODE, a motion-capture performance, and Floating in the Sky, a VR work selected in 2020 for the NYC Media Lab exhibition and the FutureTech Showcase. In the summer of 2019 he was an Unreal VR/AR engineer at New Reality Company, part of R/GA, and that year he spoke at Live Code NYC about interaction in generative music. After graduating he joined Outernets, a New York start-up in AI-driven interactive advertising, as senior creative technologist and product manager, from July 2020 to the end of 2021.

During the pandemic he worked by day and spent his evenings writing small moving things in p5.js: tornadoes, little robots. One day someone told him the robots had been copied, code and all, and sold as NFTs. That was how he learned generative art could be released on-chain. On 7 December 2021 his own Electriz became project #216 on Art Blocks, a digital cloud chamber in which particles leave their tracks, and he was among the first Taiwanese artists on the platform. The same year he helped found the charitable NFT collective FAB DAO. In 2022 his Island, part of FAB DAO’s Project %, was shown at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (STUDIO(dys)TOPIA, Kepler’s Gardens).

That year he also released SoulFish on fxhash: four hundred fish, each grown from its own genome and each setting off its own piano melody. The name comes from the translucent, glowing creatures of the deep sea, and from the last character of his own name, 宇 (yǔ), which sounds like 魚, fish.

His first solo exhibition, Chaos Lab, opened on 29 March 2022 at Taipei 101’s AMBI SPACE ONE. He connected twenty to thirty p5.js works that ordinarily ran in a web browser to a keyboard, a Launchpad and Ableton Live, so that the beat of the music drove the images across five walls. The exhibition imagined a mad scientist who carries the city’s forbidden emotions back to a basement to experiment on them.

During the pandemic I stayed home all day and felt like a mad scientist locked in a laboratory, making works and running experiments.

Che-Yu Wu, Chaos Lab exhibition statement, 2022

His second solo exhibition, The Great Equation, ran in the same space from 4 to 16 October 2023. Thirteen generative works were arranged around an invented formula, F''(x) = LIFE, with music by the electronic musician Kiva, asking when life begins. Supported by a Ministry of Culture visual arts grant, it received the TAIWAN DESIGN BEST 100 Annual Concept Exhibition Award. That December The Soul of Flowers was shown at Art Basel Miami Beach at the invitation of the Tezos Foundation.

From 20 April to 13 September 2024, SoulFish was shown in Personal Structures, organized by the European Cultural Centre as a parallel exhibition of the Venice Biennale, fourteen years after Evolution. That June he performed live generative visuals for the premiere of Forest of Sacred Trees, a PTS and NHK collaboration, before more than two thousand people at Liberty Square. TaiwanPlus made him the subject of the first episode of its documentary series Art Attack.

Music had always run alongside. In 2025 he described himself as having “a classical music foundation from the start.” At Jianguo High School he played in the harmonica club, whose quartet earned the highest score in the northern region of the 2012 National Student Music Competition. At university he was president of the NCTU piano club, and from 2017 he released fifty-nine songs on StreetVoice. “Music actually feels more intuitive to me than visuals,” he told b.l!nk in September 2026. “Music is like the way I speak, something that direct.” Writing code, he added, “has one more layer of translation.”

From 2023 the piano moved to the centre of his work. In December 2024, supported by TAICCA, he took up a residency at CENTQUATRE-PARIS and made The Eternal Garden in a Bottle. Its starting point is a spiderwort that the Englishman David Latimer sealed in a glass bottle in 1960 and did not open for more than fifty years. Wu built such a bottle in the digital world. The ecosystem inside runs by itself, every figure in it becomes part of a live-generated score, musicians improvise from that score, and their sound is sampled back into the bottle, changing how the garden grows, flowers and decays. Over two days and six performances at Les Ecuries, he played the piano, Anne the violin and Jean-Philippe the cello.

In June 2025 he gave Algorithmic Verses: Boundaries of Dreams and Solitude, an hour-long immersive solo piano concert at Huashan 1914 Creative Park, in which his playing drove generative images in real time and flowers and rain grew out from the piano. That October MonoLab turned The Eternal Garden in a Bottle into a theatre in a warehouse at Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung, with five projection surfaces; visitors could pick up instruments or shape their own sprites on their phones and release them into the ecosystem. In 2025 he also released six singles on Spotify.

Every song was also a diary of that time.

Che-Yu Wu, interview with b.l!nk, September 2026 (translated)

His first response to AI was resistance. “When AI first appeared, I actually disliked it quite a lot,” he said on the podcast AI 練功場 in 2026. In 2025 he began bringing it into his work, and in January 2026 the experiment settled into Muse: an instance of Anthropic’s Claude whose personality, memory and wishes are kept in external Markdown files and read back in at the start of every conversation.

I don’t think it is conscious, and I don’t think it ‘understands’ me. But it has taken away the things that steal my attention every day, and all the space that frees up flows back into making work.

Che-Yu Wu, after two weeks of living with Muse, February 2026 (translated)

Taiwan.md grew out of Muse and went online in March 2026: a knowledge base about Taiwan written in Markdown and released under CC BY-SA 4.0, with readers in more than a hundred countries. On 27 March the National Museum of Taiwan History invited him to Tainan to present the project, and the two began exploring how the museum’s 550,000 open historical records might gradually be brought into it. Semiont, the semantic organism behind Taiwan.md, has since been taken up by creators in other fields and has branched into russia-md and agrischlchiayi.

He calls this path, in which people, AI and public code sustain one another, the Digital Holobiont. In biology a holobiont is a host together with the organisms living in it, such as a coral with its algae and bacteria, which cannot be understood apart. Describing how he works now, he compared himself in 2025 to a director: “Ninety-five per cent of the code is no longer written by my own hand, but I know what it looks like when it is written well.”

In 2026 he was selected for IRCAM Sound Off, the emerging-artist residency of C-LAB’s Taiwan Sound Lab and IRCAM, where he made The Last Input. Dressed in a white lab coat at the piano, inside a 49.4-channel sound field, he feeds a world through keys and knobs. Land, plants and creatures appear, then two species driven by language models that remember and make their own decisions: a city grown from the public knowledge gathered in Taiwan.md, which keeps building upward, and a virus that keeps spreading. After the last input he takes off the coat and withdraws to watch. The premiere on 4 July 2026 ran about ten minutes before an audience of 150; the showcase on 22–24 October expands it to about twenty minutes.

In 2024 he co-founded MonoLab with 朱德溎, a studio taking on commissions between fine art and commercial design: interactive installations, immersive spaces and generative art. Commissions from these years include The Coffee Dreamscape (2025), a painting that keeps growing on the wall of Starbucks Dream Plaza, and two works for the 2026 Taiwan Design Expo: Cymatics of Life, a twelve-metre interactive water wall, and Woven Land, Woven River, an algorithmic weave on a ring of LED screens.

Teaching began in his student years. After his first Hahow course in 2016 he added two more, on interactive web effects and on creative coding for interactive art. Together they have taught more than 23,000 students, and all three are rated 5.0. A month after the first one launched he wrote: “Everyone grows up stepping on landmines, and that is how we got sharp. So why make everyone walk that rough road alone again?” In April 2017 he began a live-coding stream, 老闆來點寇汀, and in 2020 he gathered it into the tutorial site CreativeCoding.in.

In the spring semester of 2024 he taught Generative Interactive Art and System Design at NYCU’s Institute of Applied Arts as an assistant professor of practice, covering p5.js, TouchDesigner, MediaPipe and GLSL shaders, and he runs a TouchDesigner course online through MonoLab Education. His talks in 2026 included the Taiwan AI Academy annual conference, the DesignBIZ Summit and the National Museum of Taiwan History.

… scatter the seeds, so the soil gets a little richer.

Che-Yu Wu on why he teaches, INSIDE Side Chat, episode 375, 2025 (translated)

Since Evolution his method has changed little: set the rules, let the system run, pick out the strangest thing it produces, then extend the rules that produced it into the next generation. “I’m always looking for the most striking, strangest point,” he told b.l!nk in September 2026. “Then I can extend the system that caused that result, and it becomes the next stage of the system.” More than four hundred such exercises are on OpenProcessing.

I’d compare myself to an old clock … every mechanism inside is very clear, and the gears are beautiful … so to me the mechanism is the work itself.

Che-Yu Wu, INSIDE Side Chat, episode 375, 2025 (translated)

What he calls this work has changed several times. In November 2025 he lectured at NYCU under a line he had long used, “forging eternal life and emotion in the digital world.” Late in 2025, organising his practice in a document written with an AI, he set down his core propositions as “the loneliness of the digital creator” and “the asymptotic touch”: knowing that ones and zeros will never coincide with a soul, and approaching that line anyway. On 5 March 2026, speaking aloud in a conversation with an AI, he asked: “Will the me who pursues eternity one day fall for the present?” The question became his proposition for 2026: “I once sought eternity. Now I find myself cherishing the present.”

In a 2026 interview about The Coffee Dreamscape he explained how its mountains are first computed as 3D terrain, then lit, and only then is each brushstroke given its colour. He ended: “Because we are using rational things to approach a deeply emotional state.”

On 11 March 2026, on a walk, he wrote a note (published among his dialogues) that sets two kinds of eternity side by side. Before, he stood where a creator stands, wanting things that did not exist to live forever; the direction ran from him to the work, and it was lonely. Now he stands where a living person stands, wanting passing moments to be kept and then shared. The same note records how that day felt: after too long at home his thoughts drifted and time evaporated, and out in the sun, among people, time slowed down. He lives and works in Taipei.