PROMPTOSCAPE

What if a prompt is not a command — but a step into something unresolved? This selection was made for CIFRA by curators Dajuin Yao and Ma Nan. It extends from an international art project Promptoscape (Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, 2025) focused on how AI reshapes the way we create, see, and make sense of what we see. It unfolds within the Restart Reality season, where images no longer guarantee what they show. AI is no longer running quietly in the background. It shapes which images surface, how stories travel, where attention lands. It doesn't just produce content — it begins to change how things appear, what feels stable, what starts to slip. The artists here don't illustrate that shift. They move through it. Some begin with the image itself. In Joanna Zylinska's work, pictures start to question their own origin — who looked, who chose, what was left out. Wan Senman and Zhao Xiaofeng stay close to that instability: their images feel convincing, until something shifts and the surface no longer holds. Irina Angles brings the body into that same uncertainty. Movement becomes a signal — gesture meeting a system that responds, but not always in expected ways. In Sougwen Chung's "BODY MACHINE (MERIDIANS)", this exchange turns rhythmic, as human and machine briefly fall into sync and something almost alive appears. Time behaves differently here. In Shi Zheng's "Melting in Time 1.0", the image doesn't hold a moment — it lets it slip, continuing just beyond the point where you expect it to stop. Shao Lihao's "The River of Gentle Being" moves more slowly: forms shift almost imperceptibly, and watching becomes a way of sensing change before you can name it. Zhao Rundong moves inside the system itself. Images loop, return, transform — and so, strangely, do something like beliefs. Kwong4ever (Zhiyi Kwong) works in the same territory. In "Crypto Legend" digital avatars of the artist multiply and mythologize — cryptocurrency, code, and religious symbol layering into something that feels devotional, or a parody of devotion, or both at once. Memory arrives differently too. In Nguyen Thai Bao's "Re-impression: Water Lilies", a familiar image returns but never quite the same way — you recognise it, yet can't hold it still. Boris Eldagsen's "Blinden" drifts further, where poetry, music, and generated imagery dissolve into a sequence suspended between remembering and dreaming. Lin Zhuangxiang's "Yes It Is. No It Isn't." moves through Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, where the same meaning shifts in sound, form, and scale. Language becomes landscape. Promptoscape is not a stable place. It moves as you enter it, shifting with your attention and changing depending on what you bring. Start anywhere. Follow what holds your attention.