“[Chung] comes from drawing, and then they start to work with AI, but not like we’ve seen in this generative AI movement where it’s all about generating images on screen,” says Sofian Audry, an artist and scholar at the University of Quebec in Montreal, who studies the relationships that artists establish with machines in their work. “[Chung is] really into this idea of performance. So they’re turning their drawing approach into a performative approach where things happen live.”
Audiences watch as Chung works alongside or surrounded by robots, human and machine drawing simultaneously.
The artwork, Chung says, emerges not just in the finished piece but in all the messy in-betweens. “My goal,” they explain, “isn’t to replace traditional methods but to deepen and expand them, allowing art to arise from a genuine meeting of human and machine perspectives.” Such a meeting took place in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Chung presented Spectral, a performative art installation featuring painting by robotic arms whose motions are guided by AI that combines data from earlier works with real-time input from an electroencephalogram. “My alpha state drives the robot’s behavior, translating an internal experience into tangible, spatial gestures,” says Chung, referring to brain activity associated with being quiet and relaxed. Works like Spectral, they say, show how AI can move beyond being just an artistic tool—or threat—to become a collaborator.
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Through AI, says Chung, robots can perform in unexpected ways. Creating art in real time allows these surprises to become part of the process: “Live performance is a crucial component of my work. It creates a real-time relationship between me, the machine, and an audience, allowing everyone to witness the system’s unpredictabilities and creative possibilities.”
Chung grew up in Canada, the child of immigrants from Hong Kong. Their father was a trained opera singer, their mom a computer programmer. Growing up, Chung played multiple musical instruments, and the family was among the first on the block to have a computer. “I was raised speaking both the language of music and the language of code,” they say. The internet offered unlimited possibilities: “I was captivated by what I saw as a nascent, optimistic frontier.”
Their early works, mostly ink drawings on paper, tended to be sprawling, abstract explosions of form and line. But increasingly, Chung began to embrace performance. Then in 2015, at 29, after studying visual and interactive art in college and graduate school, they joined the MIT Media Lab as a research fellow. “I was inspired by … the idea that the robotic form could be anything—a sculptural embodied interaction,” they say.
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Chung found open-source plans online and assembled a robotic arm that could hold its own pencil or paintbrush. They added an overhead camera and computer vision software that could analyze the video stream of Chung drawing and then tell the arm where to make its marks to copy Chung’s work. The robot was named Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1, or DOUG 1.
The goal was mimicry: As the artist drew, the arm copied. Except it didn’t work out that way. The arm, unpredictably, made small errant movements, creating sketches that were similar to Chung’s—but not identical. These “mistakes” became part of the creative process. “One of the most transformative lessons I’ve learned is to ‘poeticize error,’” Chung says. “That mindset has given me a real sense of resilience, because I’m no longer afraid of failing; I trust that the failures themselves can be generative.”
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For the next iteration of the robot, DOUG 2, which launched in 2017, Chung spent weeks training a recurrent neural network using their earlier work as the training data. The resulting robot used a mechanical arm to generate new drawings during live performances. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired the DOUG 2 model as part of a sculptural exhibit of Chung’s work in 2022.