Curatorial essay
Che-Yu Wu is an algorithmic artist: he writes rules, and the images are generated from them in real time.
When New York locked down in April 2020 he began writing a p5.js work every day, and the daily works grew to more than eight hundred. His first solo exhibition, Chaos Lab, opened in Taipei 101 in 2022. It was followed by The Great Equation, computed live from start to finish, a residency at CENTQUATRE in Paris, Algorithmic Verses at Huashan, and in 2026 The Last Input, in which the notes he plays grow a world. His recent works connect more and more to the moment: the day's weather, the people sitting in front of the wall, the piano he is playing.
In late 2009, aged fourteen, he wrote his first program, called Evolution, in which strings of instructions evolved to spell fun, frog and his own English name, frank. In 2018 he went to New York University for its Integrated Digital Media master's, and when Brooklyn locked down in April 2020 he began writing a p5.js work every day, most of them published under a Creative Commons licence on OpenProcessing. Many pieces later shown in exhibitions began as one of those days.
In the summer of 2021 another artist turned his daily work Strange Robots into a series that sold more than six hundred pieces on Art Blocks. He did not ask for it to be taken down. He negotiated a share, then hand-drew "Hamily" characters one by one and gave them to people in the community.
In May 2022 his first solo exhibition, Chaos Lab, opened at AMBI SPACE ONE in Taipei 101. The Great Equation returned to the same space in October 2023: thirteen works computed live for the first time, with visitors located by millimetre-wave radar so the work unfolded around them. At the end of 2024 he was in residence at CENTQUATRE in Paris, where he made the first version of The Eternal Garden in a Bottle. In June 2025, for Algorithmic Verses at Huashan, a grand piano stood in the middle of five projected walls.
SoulSea (2021), SoulFish (2022) and The Soul of Flowers (2023) form one line. In 2023 he wrote that the fish were "born in the deep sea where all kinds of emotions condense". In 2024 SoulFish was shown in Personal Structures, a parallel exhibition during the Venice Biennale.
When he talks about Impressionism, he means method. At a talk in 2021 he said that Van Gogh sketching a scene with a brush is generative art too, only carried out by a person. Every stroke of colour in The Coffee Dreamscape is computed from a whole 3D landscape and its lighting and then turned into the texture of a brush, and the same brush was later used for Unfinished Bloom at New Taipei City Art Museum.
He learned piano as a child. In Paris in 2024 an ecosystem in a bottle generated a score in real time, and a violinist and a cellist improvised from it. In The Last Input, first performed at C-LAB in July 2026, the notes he plays grow a whole world. "Music is more intuitive to me than visuals; for me music is like talking," he said in September 2026.
Since 2024 several of his largest works have been commissions: Eternal Floral Realm for LG, The Coffee Dreamscape for Starbucks Reserve Dream Plaza, and two works for the 2026 Taiwan Design Expo. After The Coffee Dreamscape opened, family and friends passing by would send him photos, mostly of people eating, talking and sitting on the steps. Starbucks asked whether to put an explanation of the algorithm beside it. He said no: "I don't want that place to become a high-tech venue."
Quotations originally in Chinese are translated.
"I treat the system itself as the work. The images it produces are just one kind of output."
Che-Yu Wu, May 2025, podcast interview
A 49.4-channel spatial sound performance about letting go: a pianist feeds a living digital world where a City and a Virus grow, fight and evolve in real time, until the last input is given.
Sound and live performanceDigital life
A field of digital flowers generated live at New Taipei City Art Museum can be encountered only in its present state.
ExhibitionNew Taipei City Art Museum A3 gallery2026.04.24 – 08.15 · 17 photographs
→Generative impressionismPresence
A live algorithmic weaving system turns thirty-five years of Taiwan's carbon data, Taoyuan's ponds and rivers, and visitors' daily choices into one continuously growing cloth on a ring of LED.
Presence
A twelve-metre projected wall of water driven by visitors’ answers: each response becomes a frequency, and the water reveals a ripple mandala on the phone and on the wall at once.
Sound and live performancePresence
One night at Le Méridien Taipei Banqiao. On the 18th floor, overlooking the city, Algorithmic Verses carried the room through day and night in three pieces, with images generated live.
Sound and live performance
An evolving knowledge base about Taiwan, woven by humans and AI, explores cultural memory and the boundaries of a work.
A daily sketch from 7 May 2024, in which fifteen invisible points twist every pixel in turn. In 2026 it was invited into the Dimensão Randômica section of FILE São Paulo 2026: INTER-CRIATIVIDADE, watched on tablets at the FIESP Cultural Centre.
Digital life
View work →The original sketch →The work on the FILE website ↗︎
A digital terrarium that breathes on its own: an ecosystem writes a live score, musicians improvise from it, and their sound feeds the garden back. Paris 2024, Pier-2 2025.
Digital lifeSound and live performance
An immersive concert of piano, light and poetry travels along the boundary between dreams and solitude.
ExhibitionHuashan 1914 Creative Park2025.05.31 – 06.07 · 23 photographs
→Sound and live performance
An immersive, interactive commission for AMBI SPACE ONE, built around Limbo, the blurred border between reality and hell, about how people lose touch with themselves; a wave of the hand makes a visitor the conductor.
The Soul seriesSound and live performance
Selected through an open call for TAICCA's Taiwan-France residency, Che-Yu Wu spent 46 days at CENTQUATRE in Paris and built the first version of The Eternal Garden in a Bottle. Over the two days of Open Factory he performed three times a day in Les Écuries, 104's underground space, playing piano and improvising with a violinist and a cellist while two screens showed a self-evolving ecosystem and a warped score.
Photo: Hsi-Lun Chen
Digital lifeSound and live performance
The European Cultural Centre's parallel exhibition during the Venice Biennale. At Palazzo Bembo, SoulFish filled a 548 cm wall with projection; when visitors placed a hand on the touch screen beside it, the fish on the wall changed.
Photo: Che-Yu Wu
The Soul series
At the Taoyuan Tech-Art Festival, The Soul of Flowers was shown in its Eternal Dream edition and became a room.
The Soul seriesGenerative impressionism
A daily sketch from October 2023: p5.js builds, point by point, a form like clay turning on a potter’s wheel. In 2024 it was shown at the NCCU Art & Culture Center as seven black-and-white prints, with a pen plotter beside them drawing it again day after day.
ExhibitionYi-sin Gallery, 4F, NCCU Art & Culture Center2024.03.20 – 06.06
→
The Taipei edition of dialog( ), an Asian generative art exhibition: The Eternal Realm, a suite for the dome at C-LAB, with The Flower of the Other Shore as one of its passages.
Generative impressionism
A permanent piece at Tempo House in Taipei, with SoulSea running across a wall wrapped in cables.
The Soul series
Spider lilies grow out of the dark in about five seconds, each time in a new colour; the central work of Eternal Floral Realm at Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Diamond Towers, 2024.
Generative impressionism
A night city drawn by code, written in 2023 for the cover of the hundredth issue of Lexus Amazing Life; each time it opens, a different city grows.
Generative impressionism
Poems of the Hundred Peaks comes from Island, the range Che-Yu Wu wrote for Project % in 2022. In autumn 2024 he turned the minted code into a recording build, recorded a vertical film of 25 minutes 11 seconds, and set it in an AUO FindARTs 32-inch upright display in a wooden frame, in an edition of two. From the VIP preview on 24 October it hung on the AUO booth at ART TAIPEI, and one edition was collected during the fair.
Generative impressionism
A p5.js program that grows orchids in the browser: flower shape, buds, colour and the curve of the stems are set by parameters, and the picture grows anew every 60 seconds. During the 2024 Taiwan Cultural & Creative Expo it played on four upright AUO digital frames standing among orchids and driftwood at the 321 Alley Art Settlement in Tainan.
Photo: Huang Chao-Ming
Generative impressionism
During The Digital Art Mile in Basel, fxhash ran a Generative Art Kiosk at space31, printing editions from 16 collections as postcards. The Soul of Flowers was one of them, with 31 edition renders from Che-Yu Wu.
Photo: fxhash
Generative impressionism
Starbucks Reserve Dream Plaza
A live generative painting on the wall of Starbucks Reserve Dream Plaza in Taipei. An imagined coffee estate changes colour with the time and weather in Taipei, its trees grow mostly where people sit, and every twenty minutes a sea of bubbles in the colours of recent orders sweeps over it.
Commissions & Collaborations
Work made for brands, institutions and performances.
A large commission built around The Flower of the Other Shore: mathematical and physical algorithms grow into petals, stems and stamens.
Generative images and a live performance for an LG launch night. Physis is the ancient Greek word for the force by which things grow.
On the evening of 29 June 2024 PTS held a premiere of Sacred Forest, its documentary co-produced with NHK, on the National Theater and Concert Hall Plaza in Taipei; the PTS press release records more than 2,000 people. Commissioned by PTS, Che-Yu Wu made generative visuals for four pieces played by OneSong Orchestra under Lee Che-Yi, adapted from his algorithms for the Hundred Peaks mountains, The Soul of Flowers and SoulFish, and played them live with the orchestra from stage left.
A night city drawn by code, written in 2023 for the cover of the hundredth issue of Lexus Amazing Life; each time it opens, a different city grows.
White Castle’s menu painted with physics: 1,285 fully on-chain sliders that stack, sing a synthesised lo-fi beat and fly apart when you press space.
An exhibition of digital life draws on the cosmos, physics and mathematics to ask when life begins.
Coloured-pencil flowers grown by algorithm: two hundred fields minted live in Miami, then a room in Taoyuan where a spoken memory becomes the colour of a flower.
The Soul seriesGenerative impressionism
Tezos @ South Beach during Miami Art Week. The Soul of Flowers ran on one of four screens on the fxhash and Refraction live-minting wall; visitors scanned the QR code on the label to mint a flower, and 184 of the 200 editions were minted on opening day.
Generative impressionism
DIGI-FI Yilan 2023: SoulFish shown on touch screens at Zhongxing Cultural and Creative Park.
The Soul series
An interactive collaboration between Hamily and The Memes by 6529 turns mouse movement into collective action.
A work that turns internet memes into dynamic experiences through clicking, tapping and scrolling.
Unit London's booth at Digital Art Fair Hong Kong showed Che-Yu Wu's BioCode: Ecological Fusion in rotation on a 65-inch screen, two months after the series first appeared in the gallery's online show Unbound.
Image: one of the exhibited works
Digital life
Unit London's tenth-anniversary exhibition brought more than 100 works by artists from the gallery's first decade to its Mayfair gallery. Che-Yu Wu showed Flowers Impressionism, a generative work that paints clusters of flowers in impressionist strokes and particles.
Image: the exhibited work
Generative impressionism
An online group show by Unit London in which seven artists looked at the relation between biological and technological life. Che-Yu Wu showed 12 works from BioCode: Ecological Fusion, each generated from a seed number, using simulations of particles and cellular communication to grow rolling hills, ocean swells and ripples of light.
Image: one of the exhibited works
Digital life
The first solo exhibition: a mad scientist’s basement of forbidden emotions, projected on five walls of Taipei 101 and performed live with p5.js and a drum machine.
A fish grown from a sine wave and a hash: a generative, sound-making life that swam from fxhash into Taipei 101, across a touchscreen in Yilan and onto a wall in Venice.
The Soul seriesSound and live performance
Project %, led by Mashbean and released by FAB DAO in July 2022, asked five Taiwanese generative artists to write one mountain each, and Newyellow joined their ridgelines into one; Che-Yu Wu’s is Island. That September it was shown in the theme exhibition STUDIO(dys)TOPIA at Ars Electronica in Linz; in this photograph all five upright screens are playing Island.
2022.09.07 – 09.11
Fairy Village is a generative algorithm Che-Yu Wu began in July 2022: particles drift along a spiral force field and leave horizontal lines that read like weaving, overlaid with strokes for trees, windows and hills; he called the experiment generative impressionism. That September a unique work from it was shown in In Our Code, a generative-art group show of 11 artists organised by Unit London with the collector AOI.
Image: the exhibited work
Generative impressionism
After Linz, the Taiwan Creative Content Agency invited Project % to the Future Content exhibition of the Taiwan Creative Content Fest, with upright screens of the five series along the wall and plinths; on the tablet introducing the artists, his card read “① / 5 Island”.
Photo: Che-Yu Wu
An eye suspended in darkness, computed pixel by pixel in a shader, with a C minor triad falling at random: written in a Lisbon conference hall in 2021, projected across the floor of Taipei 101, minted as a hundred copies in 2023.
The Soul seriesSound and live performance
A sea of sine waves and noise, born of lonely subway rides to the New York shore: three hundred editions minted in thirty seconds, then projected in Taipei 101 and printed ten thousand pixels wide.
The Soul series
A digital cloud chamber on Art Blocks: 910 editions of particles tracing, splitting and vanishing across regions of different physics, minted out in fifty-five minutes.
Digital life
Soft, squishy, world-weary creatures: 732 interactive NFTs on an own Ethereum contract that can be dragged, and told by on-chain events to jump or speak together.
Digital life
A hundred little robots from one night in March 2021; the code was taken to Art Blocks, the community named them Sea Hams, and a family called The Hamily grew out of it.
A series of generative artworks developed around individual algorithms and presented on Foundation.
A web-based tool uses nodes, connections and a keyboard to explore intuitive, playful music-making.
Sound and live performance
Index
| Year | Title | Type | Venue / platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | The Last Input — Before the End | Work | |
| 2026 | Unfinished Bloom | Work + exhibition | New Taipei City Art Museum A3 gallery |
| 2026 | Woven Land, Woven River | Work | |
| 2026 | Cymatics of Life | Work | |
| 2026 | Algorithmic Poetry: The Meridian of Light | Exhibition | Le Méridien Taipei Banqiao |
| 2026 | Taiwan.md | Work | |
| 2025 | The Eternal Garden in a Bottle | Work + exhibition | Pier-2 Art Center, B10 Warehouse, Kaohsiung |
| 2025 | Algorithmic Verses | Work + exhibition | Huashan 1914 Creative Park |
| 2025 | Symphony of Fragments | Exhibition | 双融域 AMBI SPACE ONE |
| 2025 | The Coffee Dreamscape | Work | |
| 2025 | LG Physis | Exhibition | BREEZE MEGA STUDIO |
| 2024 | 240507: Reality Lens | Work + exhibition | FIESP Cultural Centre, São Paulo |
| 2024 | CENTQUATRE-PARIS residency and Open Factory | Residency + performance | CENTQUATRE-PARIS (104), Paris |
| 2024 | Personal Structures 2024, Venice | Parallel exhibition | Palazzo Bembo, Venice |
| 2024 | TAxT Taoyuan Tech-Art Festival | Exhibition | Zhongyuan Cultural and Creative Park |
| 2024 | dialog( ) Asian Generative Art | Exhibition | Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) |
| 2024 | Tempo House Restaurant & Bar | Exhibition | Tempo House |
| 2024 | The Flower of the Other Shore | Work | |
| 2024 | Urban Contour | Work | |
| 2024 | Algorithmic Verses: Island Impressions – Poems of the Hundred Peaks | Art fair | ART TAIPEI, Taipei World Trade Center, AUO FindARTs booth S06, Taipei |
| 2024 | Algorithmic Verses: Eternal Floral Realm, Orchid | Expo | Lesson :D, Taiwan Cultural & Creative Expo, 321 Alley Art Settlement, Tainan |
| 2024 | The Digital Art Mile, Basel | Art week | space31, Basel |
| 2024 | LG Eternal Floral Realm | Exhibition | Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Diamond Towers, Building 1, 1F |
| 2024 | Sacred Forest premiere concert | Commissioned performance | National Theater and Concert Hall Plaza, Taipei |
| 2024 | Urban Contour | Work | Lexus magazine |
| 2023 | Shape of Mind | Work + exhibition | Yi-sin Gallery, 4F, NCCU Art & Culture Center |
| 2023 | The Great Equation | Work + solo exhibition | AMBI SPACE ONE |
| 2023 | The Soul of Flowers | Work | |
| 2023 | Tezos @ South Beach, Miami | Art week | Nautilus Miami, Miami |
| 2023 | DIGI-FI Yilan 2023: Illusions of Light and Shadow | Exhibition | Zhongxing Cultural and Creative Park |
| 2023 | Hamily × The Memes by 6529 | Work | |
| 2023 | MEMEGINEERING | Work | |
| 2023 | Digital Art Fair, Hong Kong | Art fair | K11 MUSEA, 6F Kunsthalle, Hong Kong |
| 2023 | TEN: A Decade of Unit | Group show | Unit London, London |
| 2023 | Unbound: Ecological Fusion | Online group show | Unit London, online |
| 2022 | Chaos Lab | Work + first solo exhibition | AMBI SPACE ONE |
| 2022 | SoulFish | Work | |
| 2022 | Project % · Island | Work + exhibition | Kepler's Gardens, STUDIO(dys)TOPIA, Linz |
| 2022 | In Our Code: Fairy Village | Group show | Unit London, London |
| 2022 | TCCF Future Content 2022, Taipei | Exhibition | Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Future Dreams Processing section, Taipei |
| 2021 | The Soul | Work | |
| 2021 | SoulSea | Work | |
| 2021 | Electriz | Work | |
| 2021 | CryptoPochi | Work | |
| 2021 | Strange Robots → The Hamily | Work | |
| 2021 | Foundation Classic Series | Work | |
| 2021 | Sliderverse × White Castle | Work | White Castle × Doodle Labs |
| 2019 | Intuitive Music Expression | Work |
