The Still Garden series draws inspiration from Mirror of Flowers, a Qing Dynasty novel written by Li Ruzhen during the Jiaqing period. Celebrated for its nonlinear and fantastical narrative, the novel’s unpredictable shifts between scenes resonate with the associative and mapping-based logic of AI language generation. Through this dialogue between literary imagination and computational generation, the artist explores how narrative can unfold across both textual and coded forms.

In Still Garden #2, this generative logic extends into the field of marine ecology, presenting a "sci-fi-like underwater world." In collaboration with the Marine Biology Laboratory, the artist incorporates the growth equations of mussels, recorded during their response to seawater temperature regulation, into AI training data. As the algorithm analyzes these adaptive mechanisms, the coral’s fractal structures and the mussels’ movement trajectories evolve dynamically in response to temperature variations, directly shaping the AI-generated visual forms.

Transforming ecological processes into perceptible visual narratives, the work becomes both a simulation of the climate crisis and a poetic exploration of nature’s inherent uncertainty. Through this evolving artificial ecosystem, people encounter a living image of fragility and unpredictability—echoing the shifting rhythms of a changing planet.

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