Sougwen Chung (鍾慨君) is an artist born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and raised in China, currently based in London, who is considered a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration.^[1] Chung's artistic practice revolves around performance, drawing, still image and photography, sculpture, and installation.^[4] Through these media, the work explores marks made by machine and marks made by hand in order to understand the encounter and experiment with the possibilities of an artistic collaboration between computers and humans.^[5] Chung's educational background includes Indiana University Bloomington and Hyper Island, and the artist maintains an official website at https://sougwen.com/.

Chung grew up in Toronto, Canada, and Hong Kong. Their father, an opera singer, made sure that his children had experience with musical instruments at a very young age, and Chung grew up playing violin and piano. Sougwen Chung moved to the United States as a teenager and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Indiana University Bloomington before obtaining a Masters Diploma in Interactive Art from Hyper Island in Sweden.

Chung was born in Canada and grew up in Toronto and Hong Kong. Her father, an opera singer, ensured that his children were introduced to playing musical instruments from an early age, and Chung learned to play the violin and the piano. Sougwen Chung moved to the United States as a teenager and earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Indiana University Bloomington before obtaining a master's degree in interactive art at Hyper Island in Sweden.^[6]

Following their first exhibitions taking place in 2010-2014, Chung began experimenting with drawing in collaboration with machines while a researcher at MIT Media Lab in 2015.^[7] This involved collecting two decades of personal drawings to train a recurrent neural network, later titled Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_1 (D.O.U.G._1). The robotic arm's behaviour is generated from neural nets trained on the artist's drawing gestures.^[8] In a sense, the robotic arm has learned from the visual style of the artist's previous drawings and outputs a machine interpretation during the human/robot drawing duet.^[9,56] In 2016, the artist was awarded the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival for this work.^[10,11] Since then, the Drawing Operations series has continued to explore the interplay between human and machine mark-making, examining categories such as “human”, “machine”, “biological", "artificial,” and “intelligence” as evolving rather than fixed concepts.^[3,7,12]

Chung, founder of SCILICET, is also an inaugural member of NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator for technology and art, in collaboration with The New Museum.^[6] According to the World Science Festival 2018, they are an Artist-In-Residence at Bell Labs exploring new forms of drawing in virtual reality, with biometrics, machine learning, and robotics.^[13] In 2019 Chung presented a TED Talk in Mumbai titled "Why I draw with robots".^[14] In 2022, Chung's work MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_2) was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The acquisition of MEMORY comprises a fine art print, a film documenting the artist's process, and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model contained within a 3D printed sculpture.^[15] In 2023, Sougwen Chung was named to the TIME100 AI list for their pioneering work combining painting and robotics and subsequently received a TIME100 Impact Award for their influence on the artificial intelligence field.^[18,19,16] In January 2025, Sougwen Chung participated in a conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in a session titled “What Happens When Humans and Robots Create Art Together?”, where they discussed human–machine collaboration in art and the role of AI in creative practice.^[20,21]

Chung's work has been shown at galleries and museums across the world, including Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, EMMA in Espoo, Finland, Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada, MAMCO in Geneva, der TANK and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, ArtScience Museum in Singapore, Pearl Art Museum and Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum in China, TOM REICHSTEIN contemporary in Hamburg and Kunstverein Heilbronn, Germany, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte , Boston Art Center, and Grunwald Gallery of Art in Bloomington, United States, Francisco Carolinum Linz in Austria, Arts Space in Prague, Czech Republic, and Istanbul's Akbank Sanat, among others.^{[22,23,24,27,28,30,31,33,34,35,36,37]} Chung has spoken globally at conferences including Tribeca Film Festival, New York; The Hospital Club, London; MUTEK Festival, Montreal & Mexico City; Sónar +D, Barcelona, The Art Directors Club, New York; Internet Dargana, Stockholm; SXSW, Austin; FITC Amsterdam & Tokyo; OFFF, Barcelona; Gray Area Festival, San Francisco, and SIGGRAPH, Vancouver.^[38,39,41] Sougwen Chung's work has also been featured in multiple international press outlets including Art Basel, Artnet, Artsy, Business Insider, Dazed, Designboom, EXIT Magazine, Engadget, Fast Company, Forbes, MASHABLE, Noema Magazine, Sursuma Magazine, The Atlantic, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, USA Today, Wired, and Yishu.^{[42,43,46,51]}

Chung's growing body of work is created in collaboration with a bespoke, multi-generational system: the Drawing Operations Unit Generation_1–6. Each generation investigates a different aspect of human–machine interaction and symbiosis:^[32,55] MIMICRY (D.O.U.G._1) features a robotic system that mirrors the artist's drawing gestures. MEMORY (D.O.U.G._2) utilizes a recurrent neural network trained on decades of the artist's drawing data. COLLECTIVITY (D.O.U.G._3) operates as a multi-robotic system examining urban movement. SPECTRALITY (D.O.U.G._4) uses biofeedback from an EEG headset to translate meditative states into robotic movement. ASSEMBLY (D.O.U.G._5) involves biofeedback and drawing data enacted through a multi-robotic system. SPATIALITY (D.O.U.G._6) investigates dimensional mark-making as drawn sculpture.

Praesentia Sculptures (2013) are drawn sculptural prototypes, 3D printed in gold and created using custom software, which were exhibited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in 2013 and serve as prototypes for an upcoming series exploring relief mark-making. Embryo (Study OP. 5, No. 5) (2015) is a mixed media work commissioned by OFFF for OFFF Unmasked. Mimicry (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1) (2015) is an ongoing collaboration between an artist and a robotic arm. Praesentia (2015) is framed by the concept: "When a pencil moves across paper, its path is local and limited; freed from the necessity of considering the totality, it can respond immediately to 'where the hand is now in praesentia'." Memory (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2) (2017) is a performance involving robotic memory. Omnia per Omnia (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 3) (2018) is a collaborative drawing performance exploring the composite agency of a human and a machine as a speculation on new pluralities. Exquisite Corpus (2019) is a performance installation exploring the feedback loop between bodies—the human body, the machine body, and ecological bodies. Flora Rearing Agricultural Network (FRAN) (2020) is a performance and exhibition presenting the creation of a speculative blueprint for a new nature-connected robotic network. Assembly Lines (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 5) (2022) is a performance installation featuring a custom multi-robotic system driven by meditation and biofeedback.

Praesentia Sculptures (2013) are 3D-printed drawn sculptural prototypes printed in gold using custom software, exhibited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in 2013, and serving as prototypes for a forthcoming series examining dimensional mark making. In 2015, Chung created Embryo (Étude OP. 5, No. 5), a mixed media piece commissioned by OFFF for OFFF Unmasked, as well as Praesentia (2015), described with the reflection: "As a pencil moves about the paper, its path is local and confined; freed from the need to consider the totality, it can respond immediately to 'where the hand is now in praesentia.'" Following her first exhibitions between 2010 and 2014, Chung began experimenting with drawing in collaboration with machines while working as a researcher at the MIT Media Lab in 2015.^[4] This research led to Mimicry (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1) (2015), an ongoing collaboration between the artist and a robotic arm whose behavior is generated by a recurrent neural network—later named Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_1 (DOUG_1)—trained on twenty years of her personal drawings and gestures. In this human/robot drawing duet, the robotic arm learns from the visual style of the artist's previous drawings and offers a machine interpretation of it, earning Chung the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2016.^[9,3] Since then, the Drawing Operations series has continued to explore the interaction between human and machine mark-making, engaging with concepts such as "human", "machine", "biological", "artificial", and "intelligence" as evolving rather than fixed notions.^[10,53]

Memory (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2) (2017) is a performance involving robotic memory, which was acquired in 2022 by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as an acquisition comprising a fine art print, a film documenting the creative process, and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model embedded in a 3D-printed sculpture.^[64] Omnia per Omnia (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 3) (2018) is a collaborative drawing performance exploring the composite agency of a human and machine as a speculation on new pluralities. In 2019, Chung presented Exquisite Corpus, a performance installation exploring the feedback loop between the human body, the machinic body, and ecological bodies. Flora Rearing Agricultural Network (F.R.A.N.) (2020) is a performance and exhibition featuring the creation of a speculative blueprint for a new robotic network connected to nature. In 2022, she debuted Assembly Lines (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 5), a performative installation featuring a custom multi-robotic system driven by meditation and biofeedback. BODY MACHINE (MERIDIANS) (2024-2025) is a series of biomimetic robotic speculations sculpted in air, created using custom training models and spatial technologies as part of the artist’s reimagining of machines as extensions of living systems.

Chung is also a founding member of NEW INC, the first museum-led art and technology incubator project in collaboration with the New Museum. In 2019, Chung gave a TED Talk in Mumbai titled "Why I draw with robots", and in 2023 she was named to the TIME100 AI list for her pioneering work combining painting and robotics.^[54] In January 2025, she took part in a conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the World Economic Forum in Davos titled "What happens when humans and robots make art together?", where they discussed human-machine collaboration in art and the role of AI in creative practice. Chung's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, EMMA in Espoo, the Vancouver Art Gallery, MAMCO in Geneva, der TANK in Basel, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, TOM REICHSTEIN contemporary in Hamburg, and Akbank Sanat in Istanbul. She has also spoken at international conferences including the Tribeca Film Festival, The Hospital Club, the MUTEK festival in Montreal and Mexico City, Sónar +D, The Art Directors Club, Internet Dargana, SXSW, FITC Amsterdam and Tokyo, OFFF, Gray Area Festival, and SIGGRAPH. Her work has received coverage in numerous international media outlets, notably Art F City, Artnet, Artsy, Business Insider, Dazed, Designboom, EXIT Magazine, Engadget, Fast Company, Forbes, MASHABLE, Noema Magazine, Sursuma Magazine, The Creators Project, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, USA Today, Wired, and Yishu.