Duyi Han @Hebei Museum, China

Duyi Han’s commission work Landscapes: Illusions in Flux  (2025) is being presented at the Hebei Museum's current exhibition “Resonance - The Illusion of Hebei Museum”. The exhibition is curated by Mousa Art&Technology and will run until October 10, 2025.

This 3D-printed installation uses AI to reimagine the 200-BCE Boshan incense burner across shifting historical periods, cultural contexts, and aesthetic systems. The original artifact is transformed into a life-sized, horizontally expanded display structure that evokes mountain landscape, drifting cloud, and unfamiliar organism.

Embedded within ten intersecting caves, screens display one thousand morphing variations of the incense burner in the style of aged photographs. The artifact’s identity dissolves through continuous transformation—sometimes still recognizable, sometimes entirely becoming other objects, living creatures, or strange forms. With shifting light and ambient music, the animations create an immersive experience of temporal collapse and fluid meaning.

Referencing the concept of yan yun (smoke and cloud) as nature’s way of calculating time through ephemeral movement, the installation becomes a performance of impermanence and cultural projection. It reflects on design’s authorship and uniqueness in the age of AI and the museum’s role in encoding and framing meaning. Visitors encounter not a fixed relic, but a mystic computational organism and a porous vessel of unknowable logic that contains and releases as-yet-unnamed shapes and emotions from the vast universe.