The Absurd

“In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
— The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus, 1942

After speaking with Shih Yung-Chun in his studio about his latest works, I returned home and found myself thinking about this year’s São Paulo Biennial theme, “Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice.” (Note 1)

I imagine that, for Shih, humanity emerges from the absurd. The vintage objects he has collected over the years have become elemental components in the narrative universe of his paintings, installations, and AI-generated moving images. Through a nonlinear and cross-media creative process, he assembles narratives imbued with the spirit of absurdism. He has crafted seven distinct scenes reminiscent of Hollywood genre films, in which vintage dolls and repurposed antique garments perform a series of plays as a Theater of the Absurd. The intervention of AI-driven dynamic algorithms further amplifies the symbolic disjunction between storylines and characters. Shih reminds me of Camus’s interpretation of absurdism—one that navigates the space between nihilism and existentialism, valuing the process itself even when it is circuitous.

Although it has been over eighty years since Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus, the context of our times resonates with an eerie familiarity. Wars, racial conflicts, and the rapid advancement of science and technology have reshaped our reflections on fiction and reality—and, in turn, transformed how we perceive the very nature of art. Through Shih Yung-Chun’s practice, I find myself asking once again: how might absurdity, as an aesthetic mode, offer a means of articulating contemporary humanity? Conversely, in the artist’s fluid traversal across different media, how does absurdity manifest itself?

The characteristics of absurdism have been a constant presence in Shih Yung-Chun’s paintings for over a decade. As early as series like Daily Rules and Reading Habit, he began constructing non-continuous, absurd narratives (Note 2) within seemingly domestic interior scenes. Figures, objects, and events that should never coexist are brought together—at times his compositions resemble showcases of assorted collectibles, while at others they feature groups of people engaged in acts strangely out of place. The cold, textured surface of his imagery intensifies the sense of alienation, and even when he adds numbered icons—like step-by-step instructions—they do not necessarily dictate the order of viewing. In Choice Sequence in Cooking (2025), for instance, a giant hand reaches into a model refrigerator, while yellow circles labeled 1 through 7 appear to suggest certain procedural steps—a suspenseful riddle that unfolds like a darkly playful situation puzzle.

In his latest solo exhibition Forbidden Love, Shih Yung-Chun fully articulates the spirit of absurdism that has long underpinned his artistic thinking through a cross-media and collaborative approach. Taking this exhibition as a point of departure, I seek to explore how absurdity operates within Shih’s creative process and methodology by tracing his artistic trajectory and examining the cross-media condition of contemporary painting.

When Medium Specificity Meets Cross-Media Practice

In today’s world—where AI technologies are rapidly proliferating and becoming deeply embedded in everyday life—humanity and technology intertwine and influence one another across media. “Brain rot” stands as a particularly emblematic cultural phenomenon within this context. It refers to the rapid generation of illogical, absurd, low-quality images by AI and algorithms, compelling people to continuously consume this trivial, incoherent content. Take “Italian Brainrot” as an example: creators feed deliberately crude prompts into AI systems, pair the resulting images with meaningless Italian voiceovers, and produce short videos that spread virally across social media platforms. The key feature of these brain-rotting short videos is the disruption of logical continuity, which recalls political pop art, Superflat aesthetics, and the visual culture of nonsense and parody from the past thirty years—they echo a meme-like lineage, creating absurdity through the meaningless assemblage of disparate images.

In the assemblage of these seemingly unrelated people, events, and objects, imagination often spontaneously generates rationalizing explanations drawn from the visual memes (Note 3) accumulated through individual life experience. For AI, the connection between user-written prompts and its vast databases functions much like a meme, propelling associative acts of imagination. In Shih Yung-Chun’s recent work, he expands the very process of imagination and creativity within his practice, foregrounding the “medium specificity” involved in constructing representation and narrative interpretation. In a manner that runs counter to Clement Greenberg’s modernist dictum, he generates a sense of absurdity in which things remain distinctly separate yet coexist within the same space.

Why is it termed anti-Greenbergian media specificity? This may be related to the context of contemporary painting discourse in Taiwan, where he resides. Within the nonlinear trajectory of contemporary art, painting still carries the lingering ghosts of modernism within the art market and academic systems. It remains expected to be a pure, original, independent, and “unadulterated” medium of artistic expression. Postmodernism, in truth, never fully dismantled this thorny crown of medium specificity that painting inherited from modernism. Instead, it transformed it into a form of aesthetic class distinction. “If you can do it this way, why must it be painting?”—such questions often test painters during academic critiques, as if creating with paint must possess a unique purity as justification.

Looking at Shih Yung-Chun’s paintings over more than a decade, his contemplation of medium specificity has evolved along with his work in acrylic paint, oil paint, and the making of self-fashioned dolls. In his early works, he explored the scraping techniques distinctive to acrylics and emphasized the play of light in image-based painting. During this phase, he trained himself in handling pigments and developed his ability to foreground the materiality of painting. Having studied the expressive methods and compositional strategies of numerous contemporary painters, his practice evolved into a more intuitive mode. At this point, Shih Yung-Chun also began to reexamine the very nature of authenticity within his practice.

In Shih Yung-Chun’s 2016 solo exhibition Family Handcraft—pivotal in expanding his vision of the creative process—the artist shifted from his previously acrylic-based practice to working with oil paint. In doing so, he bid farewell to both a familiar medium and the particular medium-specific qualities associated with acrylic painting. Moreover, for the first time in his artist statement, Shih mentioned his own creative environment, drawing our attention to what lies beyond the canvas: the domestic setting where he lives and works, along with the steady rhythm that shapes both his daily life and creative labor. He continued to integrate the vintage objects he collected into this lived-in workspace, constantly rearranging the interior layout and furnishings with a sense of disciplined routine—yet beneath this orderliness lies a space that functions like a private museum of personal collections.

Hypertextual Forbidden Love

At the end of his statement for Family Handcraft, Shih Yung-Chun left a prophetic line that now foreshadows what we see in Forbidden Love: “Family Handcraft will continue until all objects have been given new identities.” (Note 4)

Over the past decade, through giving his collection of vintage Western dolls new identities and stories, Shih has also been rediscovering his own sense of creativity and curiosity toward narrative, objects, relationships, and imagery. Those mass-produced dolls, once standardized and anonymous, are reimagined through new systems of meaning—transformed with altered identities and rewritten backstories. The keen eye and precise hand he honed through years of painting now extend into other domains: the crafting of handmade dolls, the painting of toy packaging, and other gestures that merge artisanal precision with imaginative re-narration.

In Forbidden Love, Shih Yung-Chun brings together vintage objects, oil painting, photography, AI-generated moving images, and immersive installations to synthesize the key elements of his practice over the past decade: absurdity, antique dolls, constructed scenes, and the interplay of imagery. The process and conceptual approach behind these works unfold with remarkable complexity. Let me trace his creative process as I perceive it: it often begins with a single vintage trademark—for example, an image of a rabbit dressed in children’s clothing and a white doll sharing snacks, a motif that resists contemporary design’s tendency toward graphic simplification and flattened whimsy. With the image serving as a point of inspiration, Shih reconstructs and builds three-dimensional tableaux embodying the characteristics of that trademark, drawing from his decades-long collection of vintage dolls, fabrics, and antique objects. Of course, in translating an image into a scenographic installation, he is inevitably constrained by the materials themselves. He does not aim for faithful reproduction; rather, he works within the existing material vocabulary to create a tableau that echoes yet diverges from the original, achieving its own autonomous identity.

While approximating the various elements of vintage trademarks through three-dimensional objects, Shih simultaneously imagines what stories might unfold between them and the scenes he is constructing (Note 5). Once he has a rough narrative concept as the core of the scene, he begins photographing it in the style of film posters and production stills. Subsequently, Shih invites a director Kao Shi Wen(Note 6) skilled in AI-generated moving images to use these photographs as source material for creating animated short films (Note 7). In parallel, he extracts AI-generated images from the algorithmic process—frames deemed extraneous to the narrative—and transforms these “failed” algorithmic outputs into oil paintings that resemble film stills or vintage pictorials.

This rare and circuitous approach to creation required several explanations from the artist and his team before I could fully grasp the sequence of steps. What compels such convoluted pathways? At the same time, I found the process exhilarating—through this intricate choreography, it feels as though he were testing the very limits of the artist’s hand as a locus of subjectivity. In the conventions of art-making—established through figures like Van Gogh, Picasso and theorized by critics like Greenberg—the artist’s hand traditionally signifies the moment of originality, the spark of inspiration, and the inevitable gap between intention and execution. In the past, the hand, bound to medium specificity and expressed through intuition and brushwork, was itself a manifestation of humanity: an endless pursuit of perfection in a process that can never be completed, yet always aspires toward it (or, alternately, toward its deliberate refusal). In the age of AI, however, the artist-subject constructed through medium specificity and intuition must reinterpret authenticity in a fundamentally different way—one that negotiates agency across human and algorithmic collaboration.

In this sense, Shih Yung-Chun, as a cross-media artist, approaches intuition differently from painters or single-medium practitioners. He considers the relationship between the artist’s hand and objects, as well as the ways media shape image and narrative throughout the creative process. Such an approach would prove anathema to Greenbergian purists: in Greenberg’s view, painting should resist trompe-l’oeil, illusion, and theatricality. The irony is that these supposedly medium-specific qualities have long been subsumed into AI’s data repositories. Autonomy, intuition, and purity—in the contemporary context, these are themselves the greatest phantasms.

Imagining a Hyper-Subjective Artistic Practice

For Shih Yung-Chun, every medium carries its own significance. He does not reject medium specificity as such; rather, in his cross-media practice—where he produces discontinuous narratives and scenes—the medium specificity he emphasizes manifests not in the physical or material qualities of the work. It is not in the scraped textures of acrylic or the “sincere” brushstrokes of oil paint. He allows each medium to shape its own logic of perception—in paintings resembling movie posters or stills, in AI-generated moving images, and in the construction of three-dimensional installations. He crafts a narrative network suffused with déjà vu yet never quite identical, much like how we now categorize vast cinematic and comic texts, even stereotyping character archetypes.

In Forbidden Love, Shih Yung-Chun creates a hypertext-like garden of forking paths encompassing his painting, narrative, vintage objects, and passion for imagery and visual culture. Through these nonlinear processes, his work embodies how an artist engages in cross-media, trans-subjective aesthetic practice to dialogue with our AI-mediated era. Between absurdity and circuitousness, all objects are given new identities across different media, arriving at a form of hyper-subjectivity that redefines contemporary artistic practice.

Note 1: The 36th São Paulo Biennial, held in 2025, bears the full title Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice.

Note 2: See Chang Sheng-Kun, Reading a Novel—On “Shih Yung-Chun: Pre-Construction.” Online article available at: https://www.shihyungchun.com/zh/articles/zh-the-reading-of-a-novel, accessed September 30, 2025.

Note 3: The concept of “cultural meme” referenced here is drawn from British author Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine, which explores the co-evolution of genes and memes in human mind and culture.

Note 4: See Shih Yung-Chun, Shih Yung-Chun: Family Handcraft, Artron Art Network, December 4, 2016. Article available at: https://m-news.artron.net/20161204/n889861.html, accessed on October 1, 2025.

Note 5: In recent years, Shih has written a novel himself, making his passion for screenwriting and narrative evident.

Note 6: KAO Shih Wen is a filmmaker based in Taiwan and holds an MFA in Film from the National Taiwan University of Arts. He began his filmmaking journey as a student, with his works screened and awarded at the Taipei Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and the Korea–Taiwan Film & Art Salon. In 2022, his master’s thesis film “A Good Boy” won Best Director at the In Moments Film Festival and the Jury’s Special Award at the Golden Harvest Awards. In 2024, his AI animation “SUMI” received the Excellence Award at Japan’s AI Art GrandPrix (AIアートグランプリ).

Note 7: According to the artist during my studio visit, he considers the director’s involvement as another creator’s participation. Should this film be submitted to film festivals in the future, he would participate in the credits as production designer.