Eugene Wang: "Biocosmic Art; or How to Capture a Painter’s Brain?"

Abstract:

When medical imaging mapped the neural deterioration of the legendary Hong Kong ink painter Irene Chou (1924-2011), she looked at her own brain X-rays and experienced a startling revelation: “I saw vital images of tree branches… that is life—my life.” In this lecture, Eugene Wang (Harvard University) reconsiders Chou’s art through the converging lenses of plant sensience, systems biology, and Buddhist-cum-Daoist meditative practice, revealing her paintings not as abstract landscapes but as experiments in biocosmic imagination. From the refuge of her father’s photographic darkroom in Shanghai to her solitary, obsessive sketches of “ten thousand trees” in Hong Kong’s dense woods, Chou turned ink into a means of self-preservation: thousands of rhythmic parallel lines became protective membranes, holding an endangered inner world against chaos. Bringing Charles Darwin’s studies of plant movement, Herbert Read’s modernist aesthetics, medical imaging, and the alchemical cosmology of breathing exercise into dialogue, Wang shows how Chou transformed illness and vulnerability into paintings of biocosmic imaginative reach—works that move from capillary and cell to vortex and galaxy, forging a radiant visual lexicon of resilience, renewal, and cosmic liberation. 

Bio:

Eugene Y. Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. A Guggenheim Fellow and art-history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, he is the author of Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China, recipient of Japan’s Sakamoto Nichijin Academic Achievement Award.

Focused on the cognitive study of art, Wang’s research explores how images add up to function as worldmaking systems, and how art extends into biocosmic and psychocosmic dimensions. His work ranges from Asian Buddhist art and Chinese art history to immersive environments and digital media. He is the founding director of Harvard CAMLab, dedicated to the cognitive modeling of cultural systems.

In 2024, Wang curated Mawangdui: Art of Life, an immersive exhibition designed and produced by CAMLab that attracted more than one million visitors and received the 2025 iF Design Award in Germany. CAMLab’s Digital Gandhara was named a 2026 AWHEIC Star of Outstanding by a global heritage-education initiative of WHITRAP, a UNESCO Category 2 Centre. Wang is currently leading a new CAMLab project, Digital Borobudur.