Aluan WangAutomatic Messages

The first time I saw Aluan Wang’s Automatic Messages it felt like a whisper, gentle strokes diffusing into the canvas like a breath of wind cool upon the cheek.

The abstract textures of each curated, code-based piece evoke everything from handmade paper to swimming underwater to the indecipherable scrawlings of some obscure, old-world god.

Building on techniques from his prior projects like Turner Light and After the Cave, Wang has designed an algorithmic system that emulates nature. Yet for each incredible configuration from flowers to ferns, algae to ivy, it’s simply math in all its beauty.

The beauty of abstract art is often in the eye of the beholder; from a constellation of experiences, each individual sees something slightly different in the work. The hundred images that make up Automatic Messages remind me of the flowers my grandmother used to press and frame to hang on her walls in rural Virginia. But it’s a sleight of hand, a trick of the code, that lets us substitute one image for another.

Equally compelling within those structures is Wang’s use of texture to blend his line work, composed of thousands of tiny dots, seamlessly into a haunting, ethereal background. When combined with his understated use of color, and the way every mark has its place and yet is one with the whole, the final pieces are a quiet triumph of the organic and digital resting together in perfect harmony.

For those that know his work, none of this comes as a surprise. Aluan Wang is a prolific and award-winning Taiwanese artist of immense talent who has been working in digital art for nearly fifteen years with both experimental audio/visual pieces, as well as generative code based systems. But even after all his time in this space he still finds delight in the process of collaborating with the machine.

Curatorial statement by Haiver