Sougwen 愫君 Chung

Sougwen 愫君 Chung is an artist and researcher exploring embodiment through robotic systems, biosignal data and living silkworms.

For over a decade, Chung has developed a practice called Operational Art, built around D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generations), a series of robotic drawing systems. Early iterations involved robotic mimicry of live drawing gestures. Later generations used neural networks trained on two decades of archived drawings, EEG-driven biofeedback and dimensional mark-making. The series is now in its seventh generation. MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2) is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum — the first AI model collected by a major cultural institution.

“Sougwen Chung’s practice moves beyond the fear of pooling knowledge. At a moment when so much of the conversation around artificial intelligence is shaped by anxiety, Sougwen proposes something else entirely: collaboration. Drawing alongside their robotic systems, they turn the studio into a laboratory where human gesture and machine memory learn from one another. It is not about replacement but about co-creation, a kind of shared authorship that is constantly being negotiated.”

— Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2026

Chung’s current research, Chimeric Circuitry, asks what happens when biological processes, living organisms and electronic systems meet at the level of circuitry rather than only at the level of interface. It asks how ideas of labour, care and relationships to living systems might alter the materials and processes through which computation is constructed. Several works are now in production for two museum commissions, in New York (2027) and in Seoul and Abu Dhabi (2027–28).

“What I find so urgent in Sougwen’s work is that it bridges many gaps: between body and code, between intuition and data, between the handmade mark and the computational trace. It also bridges disciplines, bringing together art, engineering, performance and research in a way that recalls Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology in the 1960s, but reinvented for our epoch.”

— Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2026