Wang Lien-Cheng (Shrimp Dad): The Taiwanese Sound Installation Artist Who Made 23 Machines Simultaneously Read the Analects

Wang Lien-Cheng (Shrimp Dad): The Taiwanese Sound Installation Artist Who Made 23 Machines Simultaneously Read the Analects

30-second overview: Wang Lien-Cheng (Lien-Cheng Wang, born in Taipei in 1985) holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from National Dong Hwa University and a master's degree from the Graduate Institute of Arts and Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA). He is currently an assistant professor in TNUA's Department of New Media Arts. He is a member of Taiwanese sound art collective i/O Lab and co-director of Lacking Sound Festival 2009–2010. In 2017 his installation Reading Plan — 23 automated page-turning machines simultaneously reciting the Analects of Confucius — won the Lumen Prize Sculpture Award in London, and the following year the same work won the top prize at the Taipei Art Award.¹² His 2022 solo exhibition Beyond Consciousness at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum presented five autonomous-operation installations; the same year he presented the interactive performance The Living Room at TIFA at the National Taichung Theater; in 2019 he co-created with Wang Hsin-Jen and Yeh Ting-Hao the closing performance The Tremor for the inaugural Sound Arts Festival at C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab. In 2025 he staged the large-scale solo exhibition Beyond the Machine at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts at TNUA, using automated platforms featuring Buddhist, Christian, and Taoist deities to interrogate AI ethics and surveillance society. Wang Lien-Cheng is the representative figure who simultaneously inscribes algorithm, mechanism, and sound as a single line into Taiwan's contemporary sound art history.

Walk into the PostCity exhibition hall at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, in September 2017: one of the rooms holds 23 machines lined up in tidy rows. Each one cradles a copy of the Analects of Confucius, each fitted with a servo motor, an IC chip, and an LED light. On the hour, all 23 machines simultaneously turn to the next page and recite "Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?" in synthetic voices. The whole room feels like a virtual classroom someone has pressed Play on.³

The work is called Reading Plan. Its author is Wang Lien-Cheng, a 32-year-old Taiwanese artist at the time. Three months later, he collected what would become one of the most important digital art prizes that year — the Lumen Prize Sculpture Award — from London's Somerset House.¹

The number 23 was not chosen arbitrarily. It was the average number of students per elementary school class in Taiwan in 2016.³

From Dong Hwa CS to TNUA Arts and Technology

Wang Lien-Cheng was born in Taipei in 1985, graduated from National Dong Hwa University's Department of Computer Science in 2006, and entered the Graduate Institute of Arts and Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts in 2011 to earn his master's degree.⁴ He later described his life trajectory in an interview with PAR Performing Arts Magazine:

"I feel my life hasn't been about making choices — it's more like I've been carried along by the currents of the times."⁵

But behind this seemingly passive self-description runs a very clear throughline: his certainty about "understanding the world through code" never wavered. In another interview he described the perceptual structure that comes from an engineering background:

"What my eyes see is a world where the senses have been leveled out — a world where everything contains formulas, data, and code, all in orderly arrangement."⁵

This sentence explains the aesthetic choices in nearly every work he has made since. He does not begin with the intention "I want to make a certain kind of work" and then search for tools; instead, while writing code, he sees a certain structure in the world, and then moves that structure into the exhibition space. The form of the work is a byproduct of computation — not the fulfillment of a concept.

i/O Lab, Lacking Sound Festival, and Taiwan sound art in the late 2000s

In the second half of the 2000s, a scene was taking shape in Taiwan. In 2005, Yao Chung-Han, Wang Chung-Kun, and Chang Yung-Ta founded the sound art collective i/O Lab; later Yeh Ting-Hao, Wang Lien-Cheng, and Huang Chung-Ying joined.⁶ In 2007, i/O Lab began curating "Lacking Sound Festival" (LSF), a regular platform for sound art presentations and performances. In 2009–2010, Wang Lien-Cheng took over as co-director of Lacking Sound Festival.⁶

This is the crucial background for understanding Wang Lien-Cheng's creative context. He is not a lone wolf who "jumped out of a CS program to make art" — he is a second-generation core member cultivated from within the community of Taiwanese sound art. When he later won the Lumen Prize, staged a solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and took a faculty position at TNUA, all of it was grounded by ten years of ecosystem support from i/O Lab and Lacking Sound Festival.

The origins of Taiwanese sound art are generally traced to Wang Fu-Jui's 1993 founding of the experimental music label Noise.⁷ From Wang Fu-Jui's generation to the i/O Lab generation, and then to the Wang Lien-Cheng/Wang Hsin-Jen/Yeh Ting-Hao generation, Taiwanese sound art has always operated as a "small community, high density, mutually curating, mutually performing" structure. Wang Lien-Cheng's distinctive position is that he didn't only make sound — he brought sound art into mechanical installation, generative art, and social critique, expanding a spectrum that had originally centered on pure acoustics.

2017 Lumen Prize: the 23 page-turners of _Reading Plan_

Reading Plan was first fully presented in 2016 at the Taipei Digital Arts Center. Work dimensions: 120 cm tall, 11 m wide, 12 m deep, total weight 100 kg.³ Twenty-three automated page-turning machines are arranged in a long space. Each machine contains: one copy of the Analects, one mechanical arm, one IC control chip, one servo motor, several LED lights. The machines automatically turn pages, recite the text in synthetic voice, and the lights blink on and off in rhythm with the reading.

From September 7 to 11, 2017, Reading Plan was presented at Ars Electronica's PostCity venue in Linz, Austria.⁸ In December, Wang Lien-Cheng won the Lumen Prize Sculpture Award in London with this work. The Lumen Prize is one of the world's earliest and most prestigious digital art awards, founded in London in 2012 by British art critic Carla Rapoport; past Sculpture Award laureates include multiple international artists collected by MoMA and Tate.¹ Wang Lien-Cheng is among the rare Taiwanese artists to receive this award. The following year, 2018, he again won the top prize at the Taipei Art Award with the same work.²

The work's critical edge lies in the number "23." That is the average number of students per elementary school class in Taiwan in 2016. Wang Lien-Cheng explained in his artist statement: in Taiwan's education system, students lack agency — they are controlled by invisible gears. The system prioritizes industrial value and competitiveness over self-exploration and humanistic thinking. The Analects, as a text representing a thousand years of influence from Eastern intellectual tradition, symbolizes "how control over thought is exercised through the canonization of knowledge."¹³

In other words, the 23 machines are not "reciting the classics" — they are "displaying how standardized recitation itself becomes a metaphor for education." Each machine is identical, each page-turn is synchronized, every sentence is synthetic speech. This is Wang Lien-Cheng's most precise, most emotion-free modeling of a Taiwanese classroom.

2022 _Beyond Consciousness_: five autonomous-operation installations

From January 15 to April 17, 2022, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum held Wang Lien-Cheng's solo exhibition Beyond Consciousness.⁹ This was his first large-scale solo exhibition moving from individual works toward a complete exhibition thesis. The show presented five autonomous-operation installations — including mechanical arms, drones, 3D printers, and sensor devices — drawing on chaos theory to explore "power relations between humans and machines, and the boundary landscape of algorithmic society."

The same year, he presented the interactive performance The Living Room at TIFA at the National Taichung Theater: machines sense the dancers' movements and generate real-time living room scene projections; ten performances explored future domestic space, AI interaction, and how space transforms after a baby arrives.¹⁰

Viewing Beyond Consciousness and The Living Room together, one can see that Wang Lien-Cheng's concerns have shifted from Reading Plan's "critique of a specific social issue" toward a broader question: "how exactly do machines and humans live together?" He articulated this shift clearly in a 500 Times interview:

"Technology, like dark magic, aids the advance of civilization; while it achieves social innovation, the future condition of humanity becomes ever harder to predict."¹¹

FAB DAO Hundred Peaks Project: mountain water written as recursive algorithm

On June 30, 2022, FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank DAO) announced the launch of Hundred Peaks Project %. The project invited six Taiwanese generative artists — including Jason Wuu, Lin Yi-Wen, Wang Hsin-Jen, Wang Lien-Cheng, Lin Ching-Yao, and Huang Hsin — each responsible for one series of mountain peaks, collectively issuing 10,101 NFTs on the Tezos blockchain.¹²

Wang Lien-Cheng's contribution to the Hundred Peaks Project is a mountain peak series based on a recursive algorithm drawing from East Asian ink landscape painting tradition.¹² He translated the texture-stroke methods (cun-fa), compositional logic (high-distance, deep-distance, flat-distance perspectives), and tonal layering of Ming dynasty and later landscape painting into algorithmic parameters, allowing the program to generate under the same starting conditions a mountain range that visually resembles ink wash but is structurally entirely distinct with each output. Every collector's mountain peak is a unique program output.

This connects directly to the same creative logic as Reading Plan. Reading Plan turned "the classroom as a standardized structure" into a mechanical installation; Hundred Peaks turns "landscape painting as a cultural structure" into a generative program. Wang Lien-Cheng's creative method is consistent: first identify the structure underlying a cultural object, then encode that structure into a program, and let the program perform itself.

2025 _Beyond the Machine_: interrogating AI, religion, and surveillance ethics

From September 12 to October 26, 2025, Wang Lien-Cheng presented the large-scale solo exhibition Beyond the Machine at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts at TNUA, curated by Chiu Chih-Yung (professor at NTHU's Graduate Institute of Arts and Technology); the exhibition spans floors 2, 3, and 4 of the Kuandu Museum.¹³

The exhibition presents four major works:

Moral Machines places statues of Buddhist, Catholic, Taoist, and Hindu deities on automated platforms. Audience members press a button; the platform's algorithm determines the angle of tilt, causing the statue to bow toward the audience or turn its back. This work makes religious ethics training datasets tangible: AI's moral judgments actually derive from the cultural biases of training data, and different religious traditions under a single algorithm will produce different "correct answers."¹³

Subliminal Index is a five-channel real-time computed image — the algorithm fetches search-engine image classification results in real time and spreads Google's visual worldview across a constantly refreshing canvas. Audience members see how the search engine's systematic classification biases for words like "woman," "doctor," and "criminal" are repeatedly reinforced by contemporary visual culture.¹³

Universal Proxy uses VR filter overlays to write surveillance logic into an AR experience. Sentinel in Flux is an installation about mechanical collaboration.

These four works together constitute Wang Lien-Cheng's most complete creative response to the AI era. In an interview he offered a baseline for "what art is":

"True art should be something artificial intelligence cannot replicate or find a way to operate."⁵

This sounds like a defensive declaration from an artist facing the fear of AI replacement, but in the context of Beyond the Machine its meaning is closer to: if an algorithm can easily replicate a work's structure, then that work's value reduces to the structure itself; true art must leave something beyond "the structure" that machines cannot grasp. What exactly that "something beyond machines" is — Wang Lien-Cheng gives no answer. He simply keeps making machines that are sufficiently machine-like, allowing that "space beyond machines" to surface on its own.

Coordinates in the spectrum of Taiwanese sound art

Wang Lien-Cheng's division of labor with his contemporaries in Taiwanese sound / new media art is clear. Wang Fu-Jui is the label founder and curatorial pioneer; Wang Chung-Kun and Chang Yung-Ta are first-generation i/O Lab members and experimenters of the materialization of sound; Yeh Ting-Hao's strength is live sound performance; Wang Hsin-Jen is the generative art and blockchain platform co-builder; Lin Ching-Yao is a musician and digital artist and former director of C-LAB Sound Lab.¹⁴

Wang Lien-Cheng's position on this spectrum is the point where "deepest engineering background × strongest mechanical installation × most direct social critique" run in parallel. His computer science background gives him the deepest algorithmic foundation among his peers; his command of mechanical installation (page-turners, deity automated platforms, drone formations) allows him to physically instantiate algorithms into spaces one can enter; his works from Reading Plan's critique of Taiwan's education system to Beyond the Machine's interrogation of AI ethics all carry explicit social issue edges — not merely formal experiments.

In 2019, his collaboration with Wang Hsin-Jen and Yeh Ting-Hao on The Tremor served as the closing performance of the inaugural Sound Arts Festival at C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab.¹⁵ C-LAB Sound Lab was built through a partnership between Taiwan and France's IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), equipped with the country's first immersive sound theater featuring a 49.4-channel speaker array.¹⁶ Wang Lien-Cheng's generation of Taiwanese sound artists is the first generation that had the conditions to develop large-scale works in a "genuinely immersive space." The Tremor was the first realization of that potential.

Why this matters for Taiwan

Wang Lien-Cheng's international visibility requires no advocacy: Lumen Prize Sculpture Award, Ars Electronica in Linz, Belgium's Ars&D Award for New Technology Art, France's GRAME National Centre of Music in Lyon, Tokyo Arts and Space — all carry records of his work.¹⁷ The likelihood that his work will be recognized by MoMA as representative of Taiwanese contemporary digital art can only increase with time.

But for Taiwan, his significance has two additional layers.

First, he proves that engineering graduates can become central figures in Taiwanese contemporary art. Taiwan has long carried a discourse habit: engineering is science and technology, art is culture and aesthetics — the two don't mix. Wang Lien-Cheng's path (Dong Hwa CS → TNUA Arts and Technology → TFAM solo exhibition → Lumen Prize London → TNUA faculty) is a direct refutation of that habit. The path he demonstrated has since been followed by many young Taiwanese creators; the pipeline from CS and electrical engineering into arts and technology was opened by his generation.

Second, he made "machine as performer" one of the core aesthetics of Taiwanese sound art. The 23 page-turners in Reading Plan are not accompaniment or background — they are the protagonist. The deity automated platforms in Moral Machines are not props or decoration — they are the interrogator. This aesthetic stance — treating the mechanical itself as a subject — was, before Wang Lien-Cheng, largely absent from Taiwanese sound art (which was mainly led by human performers); after Wang Lien-Cheng, an entire generation of creators began seriously engaging the proposition of "what if machines are not tools but co-creators."

From those 23 machines turning pages simultaneously in Linz in September 2017, to those several deities bowing on their own in Kuandu in October 2025, there are eight full years. But if we stretch the timeline further — from 2009 when he took over as co-director of Lacking Sound Festival, to 2026 when the Hundred Peaks Project continues generating charitable distributions on the Tezos chain — Wang Lien-Cheng has become an unmissable node in the history of Taiwanese contemporary sound art.

Further Reading

• Wang Hsin-Jen (A-Luan) (zh only) — fellow Hundred Peaks Project artist, first Taiwanese artist on Art Blocks, frequent collaborator with Wang Lien-Cheng
• FAB DAO and the Hundred Peaks Project (zh only) — the complete context of the six-person public-benefit NFT project in which Wang Lien-Cheng participates
• Taiwan New Media Art (zh only) — forty years of Taiwanese new media art from Huang Hsin-Chien to Wang Lien-Cheng

References