Sougwen Chung


is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist residing in New York City. Chung's critical practices are based on performance, drawing, still image, sculpture and installation. Chung's work investigates mark-made-by machine and mark-made-by-hand for understanding the encounter of computers and humans.

Early life

Chung grew up in Toronto, Canada, and Hong Kong. Her father, an opera singer, made sure that his children had instruments in their hands at a very young age, and Chung grew up playing violin and piano. She moved to the States as a teenager and received her BFA from Indiana University before obtaining her Masters Diploma in Interactive Art from Hyper Island in Sweden.

Career

Chung's work has been shown at galleries and museums across the world, including MAMCO in Geneva, Switzerland and Istanbul's Akbank Sanat. Chung has spoken globally at conferences including Tribeca Film, New York; The Hospital Club, London; MUTEK Festival, Montreal & Mexico City; Sonar Festival, Barcelona. The Art Directors Club, New York; Stockholm; SXSW, Austin; Tokyo; Internet Dargana, Barcelona: FITC; New York; OFFF, Barcelona; Gray Area Festival, San Francisco. Her work has also been featured in multiple international press outlets including The New Yorker, Art F City, Dazed and Confused, The Creators Project, MASHABLE, Engadget, Business Insider, Fast Company and USA Today.
Chung is a former researcher at MIT's Media Lab and an inaugural member of , the first museum-led technology and art in collaboration with The New Museum. According to the World Science Festival 2018, she is an Artist-In-Residence at Bell Labs exploring new forms of drawing in virtual reality, with biometrics, machine learning, and robotics.
An example of her work is the 2017 “Drawing Operations Unit.” It is an exploration into the machine learning the drawing style of the artists hand. The robotic arm's behavior is generated from neural nets trained on the artist's drawing gestures. In a sense, the robotic arm has learned from the visual style of the artists previous drawings and outputs a machine interpretation during the human / robot drawing duet.

Selected Works