The Late Flow Young Artist Residency Program invites pairs of a young artist and a curator, selected through an international open call, to live and work at NetDragon in Fuzhou, and presents their work to the public through exhibition and publication. The 2026 jury comprised Liu Dejian, Fei Jun, Xiao Ge, Yan Yan and You Yang.
In her essay Flesh and Homeland Beneath the Cliff, curator Deng Ting approaches the project through anthropology and folk narrative. Her fieldwork along the Fujian coast, from Fuzhou to Zhangzhou and on to Pingtan Island with its Austronesian heritage, led to the question of how early inhabitants measured and named this coast with their bodies before any technology intervened. She reads the cliff as a place of departure: to set sail, one first had to climb down to the water. The work, she writes, isolates this preparatory act and restages it with technology, so that a digital double falls in place of the body. The essay closes by arguing that the more powerful AI becomes, the more precious the body is.
The completion recorded here concerns the 2026 residency phase; it does not imply that the project cannot develop further.
Down Beneath the Cliff (Experimental Game)
Experimental game, real-time moving image; 3D scanning, motion capture, artificial intelligence; dimensions variable, 2026
Down Beneath the Cliff (Experimental Game) explores the relationship between technical prediction and bodily experience through a continuously running virtual simulation. Digital doubles generated from the two artists’ body data are placed in a virtual cliff point cloud built from scans of the Fuzhou coast. AI acts as a collaborator with agency, rehearsing climbing, pausing and death. The doubles set out again and again in a loop: the body has not yet departed, yet technology has already reached the ending. Beyond the futures a model can offer, are we still willing to enter, with our bodies, a reality that cannot be determined in advance?
The coast and reefs of Dajiao Village in Fuzhou were scanned and turned into digital terrain, while walking, climbing, pausing and losing balance were captured in a safe setting to train the digital characters. In the game engine, characters, weather, tides, terrain and bodily states became runnable parameters and probabilities, so that the digital bodies run again and again and produce different outcomes of survival or death. The whole process, from the real coast to body capture, data, prediction, simulation and outcome, was compiled into a body–environment prediction archive and made into a metal book.
Down Beneath the Cliff (Installation)
Stainless steel, artist book; custom metal fabrication, book design and binding; dimensions variable, 2026
Down Beneath the Cliff (Installation) places a pool ladder beside the body–environment prediction archive, presenting an action held in suspension. A custom stainless-steel pool ladder hangs on the wall. It keeps the form of an entrance between shore and water, but no longer leads to any water. The step-shaped artist book compresses the two artists’ work with AI and technical media: bodies are numbered, actions quantified, and futures that have not yet happened are written into the archive. The entrance remains, but the body has never arrived. To foresee these possibilities is not the same as living them.
Book layout design: Anqi Wang.
