The Great Equation

Almost all of his earlier works were web programs written in p5.js. Bringing them onto four walls and a floor took nearly half a year: half rewriting, half recombining existing material. With the technical and visual director Yu Chen he joined the thirteen scenes into one show-control system in TouchDesigner. Ableton Live held the timeline and the music, the music decided when a scene changed, and the picture was split into five canvases sent over NDI to the venue’s playback system.

The venue’s millimetre-wave radar reports the coordinates of every person in the room, and a small Node.js program turns them into OSC position messages for the system. As he later put it in a class, the coordinates once reserved for the mouse were replaced by the coordinates of human bodies. In the guide the same idea reads: “You, the audience, take part in the final composition of this work.”

The music director was the electronic musician KIVΛMKII, and the two worked in reverse: Che-Yu Wu turned signals from the system into MIDI for Ableton Live, and KIVΛMKII waited for the system’s signals before mapping them onto chords and timbres that sounded good (Che-Yu Wu, talk at NTUST, October 2026).

In the regular sessions the system ran on its own, a cycle of about thirty minutes, with artist-led tours at four and five every afternoon. The performance sessions were solo or duo. In the solo sessions he improvised and guided the room, and in the duo sessions he shared the stage with KIVΛMKII, their live playing laying another layer of signal over the scenes as they unfolded.

The biggest lesson in making it came from point of view. Simulations in the studio looked down on the whole space from above, and the floor was finely worked. Inside the venue it turned out that visitors mostly see the walls, the floor only at the edge of their vision. He went on to simulate from a visitor’s eye height in 3D first, and came to see this shift from the maker’s view to the visitor’s as a small version of his own move from engineer to artist (essay for the Ministry of Culture, 2026).

The laurel of the key visual comes from the daily sketch Toxic Laurel of 11 September 2022, and the designers Yu Chen and Yu-Jen Tseng printed its generative rules into the picture: an ellipse as the base, a radius shrinking from 8 to 0, leaves scaled by distance, each ring 0.98 to 0.99 the size of the last. The Behance write-up says the key visual substitutes the original operational rules of the artworks into the base of the equation, bearing witness to the formula.

The press opening on 2 October also launched CHEYUWU, an artist brand under his own name. In the brand statement he names its three ideas: his surname Wu, genes and chromosomes, and entropy and negentropy. Visitors with a ticket could redeem the exhibition’s limited NFT, Prebiotic Flake, made from a daily sketch of 16 June 2023.

The Great Equation was named concept exhibition of the year in TAIWAN DESIGN BEST 100 (2023). MONOLAB edited the empty-room record of the run into a 27-minute-39-second film, released in June 2026. Looking back at a salon in April 2026, he said: “That large exhibition laid the foundation for every exhibition I have made since: my work is alive, which means the computational core grew from a single painting into the whole space.”

The works that followed kept to that path. The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude at Huashan in 2025, a piano concert in the Algorithmic Verses series, joined digital life to the piano, and The Last Input in 2026 has a pianist feed a living world from the keys.