Design Thinking, Technological Criticism, and Art Making: Artist Guo Cheng in Conversation

Kate Gu: Your background is in industrial and product design. How did you start making art?

Guo Cheng: It’s a fairly long story.

When I was in my final year of high school, I encountered the work of Australian industrial designer Marc Newson. I was deeply drawn to the silvery metallic surfaces and the exaggerated, sculptural forms of his designs. This fascination led me to choose industrial design as my undergraduate major. But my grades were average, perhaps because my work tended not to conform neatly to conventional standards. Looking back, the most valuable thing I gained during that time was training in design thinking.

After completing my undergraduate degree, I went on to study in the Design Products programme at the Royal College of Art in London. I chose Platform 13, which focused on critical design and speculative design, under the supervision of Sebastien Noel from the artist collective Troika, along with Onkar Kular from the Design Interactions department. Critical and speculative design follow the logic of design thinking, but rather than focusing on problem-solving, they utilise diverse forms and media to present different perspectives and pose questions. This period of study fundamentally shaped the ways I think about and approach my creative practice today. At the time, however, I still identified primarily as a designer. I’d sometimes introduce myself using a formulation that was popular among my classmates then: designer/artist. When I last saw Sebastien after graduating in 2012, he asked me how I saw my career path and future plans, and I gave him the same answer. He said, and his response has stayed with me ever since, ‘Cheng, they are different worlds.’ I didn’t fully understand what he meant when I first heard it.

I returned to China at the end of 2012 and quickly realised how difficult it was to integrate into the local scene. Critical design and speculative design weren’t widely recognised within China’s design community. As for the art world, I wasn’t particularly socially adept and didn’t come from an art academy, which made it hard to find opportunities. After some contemplation, I chose to identify first and foremost as an artist. Judging from the content and presentation of my work, it seemed closer to what was locally understood as art. I still remember the heated discussions on Weibo about whether my Mouth Factory series (2012) should be considered art or design.

Once I adopted this position, my practice came to be defined as artistic production. But self-positioning alone does not bring you opportunities. For four years, I worked full-time at an art academy, a design school, and a media art centre. In 2017, I resigned and finally kickstarted my career as a full-time artist.

Gu: Your early works, including the Mouth Factory series you just mentioned, are all related to wearable devices and explore the relationship between the human body and machines. They seem to reflect a design-based mode of thinking. How has your design background influenced your artistic practice, interests, and aesthetic choices?

Guo: Yes, these works were developed within the framework of critical design. Mouth Factory explores the idea of ‘human enhancement’ and the cyborg by expanding the functions of the mouth through a series of wearable mechanical structures.

My interest in bodily modification and body–machine configurations can be traced back to Inspector Gadget (1982), an animation I watched as a child. The protagonist Gadget is a cyborg detective who can activate various tools installed in his body. When I studied industrial design, I was also exposed to ergonomics, specifically physical ergonomics, whose aim is to design products that conform to the human body—essentially using technology to accommodate human needs. In Mouth Factory, however, I’d already begun to consider how humans and technology might merge in a more egalitarian way, or how humans adapt to technology and are transformed by it. The project imagines what kinds of structural changes such ‘collaboration’ might bring to the human body.

Looking back now, my early works, such as Flipped World (2011), Mouth Factory, and the Gibbon series (2014–2015, in collaboration with Chen Yiyun), largely followed the design logic of ‘form follows function’ in their choice and treatment of materials and forms. The first time I consciously introduced context-specific ‘decoration’ was in Breathing Restraint (2016), for which I affixed a fixed asset label, similar to those used by government offices or schools, to the casing of an internet device.

Gu: Your practice often combines mechanical components, mixed media, and computer programming. Could you describe your creative process?

Guo: My practice is very concept driven. I usually begin with a concept, then I consider the most appropriate form through which it might be realised. From there, I look for suitable materials, research techniques, and start to experiment and make—perhaps a way of thinking that is still very much shaped by design. I developed my knowledge of mechanical parts, mixed media, and programming over more than a decade of artistic practice.

I began working on Mouth Factory during my master’s, when I spent much of my time in the workshops at the Royal College of Art, learning and practising fabrication techniques. I became proficient with lathes and milling machines; all the metal components in the series were made by me in the workshop. The experience gave me a concrete understanding of the design logic of mechanical structures and the possibilities of fabrication. After that, while working at the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai (2015–2017), I learned the basics of programming and PCB circuit board design from the centre’s then Director of Research and Creation and artist, Fito Segrera, who later became a close friend. From 2015 onward, I started to incorporate programming into my work, such as in Gibbon II and Breathing Restraint. In recent years, I have also begun experimenting with metal casting, like the asphalt in Trouble (2022), as well as aluminium and tin casting in the ongoing Fog Basker series (2024–).

Gu: The two works commissioned by M+, Becoming Ripples (2024) and Digital Terraforming (2025), along with your earlier project The Net Wanderer (2019–2021), all reflect your ongoing research into digital infrastructure. You also show a strong interest in the Anthropocene and its lasting impact on the subterranean world. Both lines of inquiry engage with hidden histories, structures, systems, and entities. Could you talk about why you are drawn to these topics?

Guo: Broadly speaking, I find myself more interested in the internal logic through which technologies, or technological concepts, are constructed, rather than what they are capable of doing. In 2017, I received a research grant from the Netherlands through the BAD Award, which allowed me to collaborate with ecotoxicologist Dr Heather Leslie on an interdisciplinary project, A Felicitous Neo-past. Through the collaboration, which incorporated her scientific research on microplastics, I shifted my focus toward the Anthropocene and began intervening in its geological strata through my work. On a reclaimed site in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, I excavated a one-square-metre area through the layers of the Anthropocene. I removed the soil, extracted and cleaned the traces of human activity in it, and then returned the soil to the pit. In this way, I created a one-square-metre zone free of human traces within an artificially constructed landscape. Through this paradoxical site, I explored the entanglements between humans, the environment, and technology. This project established the thematic concerns, conceptual logic, and methods that continue to influence my work.

Gu: Becoming Ripples was commissioned for the exhibition Shanshui: Echoes and Signals. The mechanism that activates the mirrored fabric and lighting operates through chance, and viewers must wait patiently to watch the work ripple. The piece addresses the relationship between technology and nature. How do you understand the interplay between control and randomness in these two forces?

Guo: Randomness is one of the recurring themes in my work. Due to the constraints and technical conditions of the exhibition space, the kinetic behaviour of Becoming Ripples is driven by a pseudorandom algorithm. Pseudorandomness describes an appearance of randomness that is reproducible, while true randomness arises from uncertainties in physical processes. True randomness is sampled directly from random events that occur in the natural world and cannot be predicted or replicated. For example, my fortune-telling installation Abstract Oracle Generator (2020) samples randomness by detecting radiation particle collisions via a Geiger–Müller tube. The resulting data is converted into random acronyms responding to questions participants may have in their minds.

I see randomness as the underlying condition of all existence. The universe can be understood as a system in which entropy continually increases, giving rise to greater randomness. From the emergence of the first organic molecules in the primordial soup to the evolution of living organisms, this principle holds true. In the technological realm, randomness is the foundation of cryptography. The unpredictability of random numbers determines the strength of cryptographic systems; processes such as TLS handshakes, blockchain key generation, and mechanisms of verifiable randomness all rely on it. In today’s highly interconnected world, the unpredictability of randomness also determines whether communication across infrastructures can be securely controlled. In other words, control itself is grounded in randomness. The two are not opposed but fundamentally intertwined.

Gu: One distinctive feature of Digital Terraforming is that it visualises the compression of time and space. How do you think this kind of compression affects our everyday perception?

Guo: Digital Terraforming uses the network diagnostic tool traceroute to trace the IP addresses traversed during data transmission between a visitor’s device and the work’s server. These IP addresses are then used to retrieve the geographic coordinates and city information of the corresponding network nodes, which are mapped onto a three-dimensional digital globe. The nodes gradually converge toward the globe’s interior until they nearly overlap, while the globe’s surface surrounding these recessed nodes is pulled inward. As a result, each visit produces a unique deformation of the digital Earth. Yet regardless of how the form changes, the structure remains topologically equivalent—or homomorphic—which is the origin of the work’s title. This deformation can be viewed from outside the digital globe, or viewers can scroll and enter its interior, observing at close range the nodes clustered together within the globe, as well as the flickering map of submarine cables on its inner surface.

The reason for compressing the nodes inward is straightforward. I wanted to present two simultaneous realities: the vast physical distance separating nodes across thousands of kilometres, and the millisecond-scale speed of data transmission between them. When the nodes on the surface of the digital Earth draw infinitely close, it feels as if one could step across these distances in an instant. At the same time, the work underscores that every seemingly effortless action we perform online, even the smallest movement of a finger, may be sustained by massive, transregional infrastructures and energy systems.

Gu: Becoming Ripples points to how digital signals are embedded in the physical world through digital infrastructure, and Digital Terraforming reveals hidden infrastructures such as submarine cables and servers. Both works also contain invisible layers of code. What do you think about these hidden codes—elements that constitute the work yet remain outside its visible presentation? More broadly, how do you understand the materiality of technology?

Guo: The interplay between visibility and invisibility is an apt way to describe the world we live in today. All living beings and non-living ‘things’ are made up of technological components, whether direct or indirect, many of which remain invisible. Take something as ordinary as a pair of glasses: their production involves polymer chemistry, injection moulding, and mechanical processing. As a technological object, glasses correct vision and help people function better in society. Within the frameworks of the Anthropocene and planetary thinking, ecological systems and technological systems are entwined and continually shape one another. In this sense, it could be said that all things contain hidden technologies—technologies that constitute the object yet remain outside its display (or are simply overlooked because they are so ordinary). This is a fundamental logic of our world.

In these two works, the treatment of invisibility is relatively simple. Becoming Ripples presents a large sheet of mirrored fabric. The occasional, mechanical disturbances of the fabric and the viewers’ distorted reflections form the complete experience of the work. I think the sense of something being ‘covered by cloth’ is a direct expression of technological invisibility: viewers may sense that the work is activated by a mechanism or technology without fully knowing what those structures are. Digital Terraforming is an online, programme-based work, so its relationship to code is more explicit. The deformation of the Earth’s surface is necessarily driven by code. When viewers move beneath the surface of the globe, they encounter another layer of information: a distorted map of submarine cables. From another perspective, code itself is a computer language and a form of mediated information. For humans, it is more abstract than a map of submarine cables. Both can be seen as forms through which abstract technologies are expressed and communicated, without any essential difference between them.

Code, then, can be understood as a ‘representation’ of technology. Technology doesn’t conceal itself; we simply need intermediary forms to comprehend and engage with it. As stated in the Book of Changes, ‘The Great Treatise’, part I: ‘That which transcends form is called the Tao; that which takes material form is called the vessel.’ The ‘representation’ through which sages ‘fully express meaning’ can be understood as media—as manifestations of the Tao. Media help us grasp the Tao (in this context, technology), but they are not equivalent to it.

Gu: These two works extend your ongoing research into the Anthropocene and point to the profound impact of technological activity on the Earth’s surface. You have also recently conducted field research in rainforests, studying food chains and complex ecosystems. How do you understand the ties between humans, nature, and technology?

Guo: Humans, together with other living beings and non-living entities, including technology, form interconnected networks that collectively constitute nature. Technology can give the impression that humans are becoming increasingly distanced from nature; yet, when we examine technological systems more closely, we begin to see how deeply they depend on natural processes. This dependence manifests in many ways. For example, as mentioned earlier, the randomness of the physical world forms the foundation of cryptography.

At a macro level, some contemporary data centre infrastructures in China, such as computing clusters, are built inside mountains or beneath the sea. These sites are designed to create sealed, ‘clean’ environments that exclude insects, dust, and other natural elements, a complete separation from nature. At the same time, they rely on the low temperatures of caves and underwater environments for cooling, and they depend on energy derived from fossil fuels, water systems, sunlight, and wind. This reliance on natural conditions and resources is itself a crucial component of the networked systems that sustain digital infrastructure.