D2305 uses new media as a kind of sex determination system. Through "embodied self-performance" and a back-and-forth creative process with different AI language models, Ning Wen keeps performing and reshaping new versions of sex, gender, the body, and identity in a decentralized Web3.0 space.
Ning Wen is not using AI just to generate images. It's the other way around-he started by creating a series of semi-dynamic self-portraits, or cinemagraphs, and then fed his own works into the AI. He asked it to deconstruct the visuals and turn them into new prompts and texts. During this process, he kept experimenting, probing AI's taboos, its biases, its overly politically correct rules, its language issues, and cultural misreadings. He wanted to see how AI understands the gender, roles, elements, gestures, compositions, or meanings inside these bodies.
Since he was young, his gender and sexual orientation have been fluid. But growing up in a conservative environment, all of that was suppressed. He gradually became someone without a clear sex or gender. In the era of Web2.0, he tried performing different identities through anonymous voices and images, searching for ways to connect with his own body. But those identities were still controlled by centralized systems. They were often erased, treated like background noise. He started to wonder, what if he could break those taboos in Web3.0 using new media? Could that become a new kind of queer body?
So he gave birth to a new queer body on the blockchain. Its flesh is made of short meme-style videos. Its private key is its genetic code. It lives as a native of Web3.0, constantly looping inside boomerang videos.
Along the way, he recorded different observations around new media, bodies, and desire. Things like metaverse mind trash, self-media desire capitalism, the technological singularity, desire and neoliberalism, racial dynamics on-chain, virus carriers, AI's forbidden rules, and the question of how microworkers experience sexual violence and redemption. In this process, he felt like he was playing every role in Gayle S. Rubin's sex hierarchy. He kept shifting, staying in a constant state of transition.
Note: A sex determination system is what defines the development of sexual traits in living beings. Most are decided by genetics, but some are shaped by environmental or social factors. In this project, D2305 introduces an experimental version 3.0-using new media as a system to determine sex and gender.
This project is sponsored by National Culture and Arts Foundation
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Ning Wen
Nig Wen's works across various disciplines including live art, virtual reality, immersive theatre, photography, participatory art, and crypto art. Their early practice focused on participatory art as a way to disrupt sexual hierarchies and deconstruct taboo narratives. More recently, they've been using new media to perform multiple identities, exploring the complex relationships between gender, the body, and media-especially after stepping beyond the limits of the physical self.
Their works have been exhibited and awarded both in Taiwan and internationally, including at: Hong Kong ifva Festival, the New Voices Award in the U.S. for VR, ELLE New Talent Fashion Shorts, the First Prize of Art Freedom Day, the Golden Harvest Awards, as well as film festivals in Vienna, Belgium, Italy, Berlin, and San Francisco.