MFA VISUAL ART
Xuan
Xuan is a new media artist, filmmaker, and musician who offers little concrete description of her own work, preferring to leave her audience to arrive at their own conclusions regarding its meaning. What is clear is that she is profoundly concerned with troubling the concept of the human, especially in an era where artificial intelligence has raised novel questions regarding the boundaries of life and sentience.
In particular, Xuan approaches these issues through a personal philosophy informed by esoteric Buddhism, stating: “central to my work is the return to emptiness.” Rather than questioning whether AI could ever rise to the overdetermined ideal of the Cartesian self, she suggests that the self is fundamentally empty—an ephemeral non-thing that arises through thought and sensation.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that the grasping hands of Emergent Body / Disobedient Land are meant to represent an artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, they insinuate a nonhuman entity whose unfamiliar condition and behavior provoke difficult questions from their human observers: Does this entity have needs or desires? Is it conscious? Does it feel pain? Perhaps most troublingly, they raise doubt that we can even begin to determine the answers to such questions when their subject is something so utterly unlike ourselves.
Faced with the possibility that those questions may never be answered (or indeed, answerable), Xuan argues for compassion as a first principle for relating with other-than-human beings, including artificial intelligence. Even so, she asserts that “we can’t humanize it, because it’s not humanizable.” Instead, Emergent Body / Disobedient Land makes the case for abandoning our fixations on humanity altogether.
— Mia Caroline Kivel, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Candidate