interview with xue lei

Portrait of the artist, courtesy Xue Lei.

Under the canopy of art, Xue Lei has multiple identities for recognition and engagement. He is, first of all, an artist, a scholar, and a teacher, each role enriching his presence in the art world. As we look closer, we discover his interest in artificial intelligence, the metaverse, new media interactive art, and materials, mainly ceramic, herein to say. He recently produced an immersive video with the artist Zhao Bozou for the “Earth, Home!” project, which was showcased in September at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Taking this opportunity, we invited him to delve into his practices in new media and digital art. It was an open and profound discussion—we aim to break down some of these keywords above, further explore Xue Lei’s research interests and creative practice, and understand how he responds to the rapidly changing utilizable technology in the contemporary art context.

VERA GAN: Your art practices appear to have two independent traces. One centers around new media and digital art, and the other focuses on porcelain as a medium. Could you discuss these two traces individually?

XUE LEI: I just finished the paperwork with the Pergamon Museum in Berlin—they collected a series of my porcelain works. After its renovation in 2027, my works will be exhibited in the first show in a chapter showcasing the spread and communication of Chinese cultural symbols on the Silk Road. For those unfamiliar, Pergamon Museum is one of the must-see museums of Berlin, one of five museums on Museum Island. Though many of my works are collected by various institutions and museums, I highly value the Pergamon Museum, where the Ishtar Gate, originally built in Babylon and amazed Alexander the Great when he took over the city in war, is reconstructed and displayed. I share a profound emotional bond with the museum.

Suppose there is a career path for a contemporary artist, from being independent to being presented by a gallery to being showcased and collected by major museums and to biennials. In that case, I have already finished these checkpoints.

Drinking Tea, 2004-, hand-painted porcelain, Galerie Hubert Winter.

However, working in new media and digital art is another different story. Technically speaking, I am a person from the era of film. I started practicing digital art around 1999 to 2004, the first revolutionary period from film to a world of digital signals. In 2022, we suddenly noticed the AI Algorithm Model and delved deeper into related areas since February 2023, both doing research and experimenting with new artworks. I often became a student exploring new technologies and possibilities with someone from the next generation, the same generation as my previous students. Together, we study generative AI—the core principle underpinning its operation- and the potential in application, prompts, and algorithms. I always feel that my learning is outpaced by its updates, so I even hesitated to stay in frequent contact with my social life last year and instead spent as much time as I have in learning.

Now it is much better. Last year, I wrote and published a few writings on related subjects and finished the AI film “Marco Polo 700 Years” exhibited this year at The Third Annual Metaverse Art @Venice. When we pre-trained the AI, it was the time when the AI completed one iteration in two weeks. That’s why when I lecture at Goethe University Frankfurt, I mark down the time of the production of class materials. It is essential to show students how the technique evolves in such a short time. It is challenging to me in a way that I cannot indulge myself in following some ready-made paradigm and custom.

Marco Polo's Journey - Short Film Poster, courtesy of the artist.

VG: Do you remember when and how you got involved in making new media art?

XL: I received very traditional art training in school and back home. I studied classic oil painting before attending the Kassel School of Art and Design (Kunsthochschule Kassel) in 1998. Dated back even earlier to my childhood, I grew up with constant exposure to stage art. My father was the choreographer of the musical “The East is Red", and I had the opportunity to be closely involved in stage making, such as drawing films and stage curtains, when I was a child.

When I first arrived at Kassel, I continued my path in plastic arts. One thing incredible about our college is its emphasis on experimental and interdisciplinary approaches, encouraging us to expand our expectations and be innovative. At first, when we tried working out something that today is recalled as digital art, we did not seriously consider making any artwork. People from moving image backgrounds and I “played" and “partied" together, using Flash to create eye-catching and impressive works. That's nothing like traditional video making. For instance, we transformed audio into visual form and regulated it with a WIFI signal controller. It was dazzling and breathtaking at that time.

To us who were trained in traditional and solid art, such a technological change from film to digital signals was astonishing. We used to spend a huge amount of time and effort processing film and developing it. But in the digital world, as everything is digitized, I could control the exposure, the image development, and eventually the image as I wished.

We never realized it was a revolution. We thought it was an update of software and technology and professors introduced us to more incredible technologies. That could be because we are inside and part of such a revolutionary force. When I started lecturing and advancing at a theoretical level, I later realized I experienced one of the significant changes in human visual history and witnessed another. When discussing human visuals, sight from bare eyes is the first and earliest. Later on, the convex lens and the perspective projection were invented. Johannes Vermeer was known to paint with help from such a viewing mechanism. Subsequent developments included photography and the early era of film, both based on the lens's mechanism. Later on, computer-generated imagery came into play, which marked the beginning of digitalization, which did not need a lens anymore.

This time, before the flourishing of metaverse and AI, I soon recognized it was another revolution. Unlike last time, when we were involved and swept along by the trend, I am aware of what is happening and can consciously participate. That's why I followed the evolution of technology closely and was willing to learn like a young student from the start.

VG: We are used to describing the invention of AI as revolutionary. Could you elaborate on this - how and why?

XL: It is not a simple technology issue - it is not merely about efficiency. It is because it represents a transformation of the era. AI provides a new perspective and way of thinking beyond technology.

The value of art is not in the material but in its ability to reflect the essence of an era. Take Picasso's paintings as an example. They are important examples of representing our human history in 1900, as slides of history, as instruments to grasp to know ourselves, not for the cost of materials. Similarly, in the age of AI, we need new art forms to document and present the characteristics of our time.

The impact of AI on social structure and knowledge-making is already evident. When I started making “Marco Polo's Journey 700 Years," I had a utopian fantasy that all human cultures would become samples, existing equally before AI. However, I soon realized the problem during production. I found very little content with the term Indonesia, so I changed it to Bali. If you watch the film now, when Marco Polo sailed to Singapore and Indonesia, the whole scene is picturesque and stunning, and it is a tourist paradise. That's because Bali is one of the tourist destinations for Westerners. In reality, though the idea of equal cultural sampling logically exists in the AI era, the influence of online communication hot words affects future AI generations.

AI captures datasets that can be understood as a collection of existing human knowledge, but this knowledge generation inherently has biases. Therefore, it leads to significant deviations produced by these communication hot words.

Another example is what I call “Kublai Khan's Hat." I had to create Kublai Khan's image with AI but couldn't generate his Mongolian attire. The face generated by AI was Mongolian, but the hairstyle and outfit were either Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. AI couldn't produce the traditional Mongolian short-brimmed hat. Eventually, I had to cut off Kublai Khan's top part of the head in the final film. Due to the limited discussion on Mongolia, generating related content effectively and correctly is difficult.

Kublai Khan’s Hat: the original Mongolian short-brimmed hat versus the AI-generated hat.

In the past, we called it “God’s perspective.” Now, we use the term “AI perspective,” which is an all-encompassing view. I believe the human society we see will be different from the authoritative perspective of AI. We are experimenting with multi-dimensional and full-dimensional interactions from my previous project at the Xihu Theater (Hangzhou) and the Earth Home project at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

Normally, people understand interaction like making a radar or sensor, walking to a specific location, and changing the scene with a touch, which are just the technological presence of digital art. What makes digital art fascinating is that you suddenly perceive parallel worlds and multi-dimensional spaces that are otherwise invisible in a dull three-dimensional space of reality.

Every human progress, whether visual or cognitive, is complicated. Currently, digital art is at a stage where we are exploring new visuals and social forms. These explorations will be recorded by history. Humanity has reached a point where they are no longer satisfied with two-dimensional images and video spaces but entering a multi-dimensional perspective or a 360-degree panoramic view. We will never achieve the authoritative God’s perspective because we are not deities.

This brings about human progress. We are arduously exploring, and I am also striving in this attempt. Still, it is fascinating because we are exploring meaningful things, not just doing commercial projects with cunning strategies for targeted advertising. Real, meaningful digital art explores new boundaries of human perception and knowledge-making.

VG: Do you remember your first piece of work? What are your thoughts on them now?

XL: The question could be when. My earliest work during my college days is a realistic oil painting of an old lady from rural Shandong. She shared stories of being kidnapped by bandits when she was young, fighting against Japanese soldiers in rural Shandong, and going through the Cultural Revolution. She also talked about the deaths of her husband and child and the struggles of daily life. She kept talking till the light was out because the kerosene was gone. After she finished her story, she sighed deeply, and I immediately drew her. This piece was one of my first college works.

As for digital art, my animations have been featured in many international animation festivals. One film I particularly liked was called “Cat Subway”, which explored overlapping human images, and I loved it even though it did not win many awards. The film is based on a poem by a Hong Kong poet that describes the inner feelings of urban Hong Kong people, capturing their unique emotions and sensitivities. The author Chan Lai-kuen is incredibly talented, and I admire her greatly.

Cat Subyway.

VG: The ways of thinking and working of artists, academicians, and research teams such as Microsoft, we discussed are different due to their various professional identities. Based on your past experiences, how do these differences manifest in art, research, or technological application development?

XL: Let me start with something straightforward. In the exhibition “Beyond the Anthropocene" at UCCA Beijing in November 2022, I finished a collaboration with Professor Feng Xiaoming, who is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He specializes in chiral molecules, likening them to our right and left hands—they're similar but can't overlap. The research on its asymmetric catalysis is based on repetitive and multiple experiments; there are few regular patterns to follow. I realized it was like a slot machine, relying on chance.

Later, inspired by an antique iron cake mold from 1640 Germany depicting the image of Adam and Eve in Eden, I created a series of videos and installations. The installation is much like a slot machine. Juxtaposing the uncertainty of chiral molecules and slot machines, I opposed the creator's changes on Adam and Eve with scientists altering molecular structures.

This slot machine is like the professor's daily experiments, full of unknowns and randoms. When people touch it, it spins random outcomes: maybe three Adams, three Eves, or a mix. It's akin to his experimental process. Is this logically reasonable? It seems so. But it's different from scientists or AI—it's daringly artistic. I boldly conjecture the process of the creator's creations.

Art, including contemporary art, offers diverse possibilities in our world. There is nothing that is uniquely correct. We adopt an ascending logic to understand human history. All societies initially prioritize order and logic. Once the structure and system is established, its upper echelons maintain and benefit from it. However, if this system becomes overly rigid and presents only one condition, problems arise—like health issues from consuming only grains. Art is akin to vital micronutrients; it is meaningful, altering our thinking through digital technology, beyond mere tool usage.

I talked with Professor Feng about our art and science relationship, especially the brainstorming part. Later one day, I asked about his opinion, and to my surprise, he found it fun and said he liked what I did. I thought it might be offensive, but he was happy.

Exhibition Views of “Beyond the Anthropocene” at UCCA Beijing. All images are courtesy of the artist.

VG: What do you think about the popular narrative of “cross-boundary"?

XL: As mentioned before, when making new media, we were a group of students: I did plastic arts, some did computing, and others did photography and video. We naturally gathered with beers, developed new software, and tried new syntheses of images, motion changes, and music. Now it's called cross-boundary, but for us, it was natural. Theorists created many theories about how art and science were once unified and then split, but for us during that time, it was boring.

We came together for a common purpose or project, not thinking it was cross-boundary, just working together. Who said artists can only be with artists? That's nonsense. Can you understand or relate it to this life? As we created, we often sat by the street with beers and watched. One day, someone suggested making a nice video with matching dynamics and music. VJ and DJ were born. The computer guys said it was easy and made us fun software, and we started working on it.

Now it doesn't seem very easy, but the beginning was simple. It did not follow any strict causation. Also, the motto of Kassel Art Academy is “Social Integration into Art."

VG: NFTs have made a stunning debut in the public on a scale that was hardly anticipated and later experienced turbulence due to the global crisis in the crypto financial system. What do you think about the NFTs in terms of their growth and legitimacy, or how do you see their future?

XL: First, NFTs are just a stepping stone. We used to upload our content to the internet for free. Now, it allows authors and creators to participate, feedback, and even profit from it. NFTs invite people to engage in the chain, which becomes a small step into the next era.

Crypto art and crypto finance are two different things. The key to crypto art is its contractual nature, which can be used to create incredible pieces of art. This is crypto art - but we mostly face so-called crypto finance driven by speculators.