The Still Garden #1 series draws inspiration from Flowers in the Mirror, a fictional fantasy novel written by Li Ruzhen, a Qing dynasty literatus, during the Jiaqing reign. Known for its nonlinear, fantastical narrative, the book’s unpredictable scene transitions mirror the associative logic of language generation in artificial intelligence. The artist combined these two modes of composition — literary imagination and computational speculation — to explore how narrative can unfold across both text and code.

At the core of the work lies Jiayu*, a multimodal AI system developed by the artist’s team based on the Transformer architecture. Using three-dimensional environments from the artist’s earlier works as a training dataset, the system translates generative text into spatial coordinates, forming what the artist calls the machine’s spatial memory. Through procedural simulations in Houdini, these coordinates are continuously reconfigured and rendered as evolving virtual landscapes, tracing a dynamic exchange between language, geometry, and cognition.

Still Garden #1 reconsiders the fictional as an active structure of thought rather than a literary path. By examining the fluid interplay of semantics and metaphor, the work reveals a distinctly perceptual form of worldbuilding, one shaped through language, shared memory, and associative mapping. Eventually, it opens a port onto emergent perceptual systems and aesthetic forms arising from human-machine co-projection.

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