Lingfei Shen's practice has consistently revolved around an ever-shifting material logic. From resin sculptures to bio-sensing devices to geometric structures made of electronic waste, her work follows a clear trajectory. It starts with a tangible physical form, and then a visual system, built from flows of data and technological fragments, gradually emerges. In this process, materials are not merely carriers of meaning. They become the meaning itself. Through transitions between different materials, she probes the relationships among perception, the body, and technology.
If her earlier work was concerned with how materiality could become a vessel containing emotional experience, her more recent output is more experimental: how could emotion, bodily resonance, and technical systems come together to form a new visual system?
In Peeping Bloom, Shen uses resin as her primary material for experimental sculpture. Resin has an inherent duality. It carries the feeling of detachment of an industrial product, yet through manual crafting, it can take on soft, fluid forms. Shen exploits this quality by repeatedly casting, shaping, and polishing the material, keeping it in a state hovering between manufactured and accidental.
The resulting forms display distinct animate characteristics: bending, stretching, and intertwining. They resemble magnified cellular tissue or stirred liquid in a frozen form. The folds and curves that emerge during the solidifying process are left intact, giving each structure a quality that feels almost naturally generated.
Visually, Shen employs a stripped-down black-and-white palette. The contrasting colours are not merely oppositional; they highlight the complementary relationships between forms, much like the interconnected yet contradictory relationship between yin and yang. White structures tend to be more open and expansive, while black ones appear denser and more gathered. Together, they establish a subtle rhythm in the space.
The work incorporates mirrored acrylic as a backdrop. The reflective surface produces spatial doubling, visually replicating the sculptural forms and extending them into the space. As the viewer moves, the sculpture, the background, and the viewer's own reflection overlap into layered imagery. The sculpture is no longer a fixed object. It becomes a visual system that shifts as one’s perspective moves.
Methodologically, Peeping Bloom leans more toward a combination of material and spatial experiments. The resin shaping provides a soft form, while the mirrored structure places those forms into a dynamic visual environment.
Although much could be said about the crafting process, the final form of this artwork is still a work of precision and control. The monochrome palette, the mirrored backdrop, and the carefully preserved folds are all ‘polished’ and fixed designs. The work presents the appearance of process without leaving that process genuinely open. What reads as contingency has already been resolved. In this sense, Shen's mastery of the material is clear. But that same mastery is also what keeps the work at a distance from the uncertainty it seems to pursue.
While Peeping Bloom still relies primarily on the language of sculpture, Intimacy.zip moves a step closer to a more complex technical system. At the core of the work is a set of electronic devices that read physiological signals from the body, such as heart rate, brainwaves, and body temperature, and then translate those signals into various forms of feedback, represented by changes in light, vibration, and temperature.
Structurally, the piece functions more like a real-time feedback system. The viewer's bodily responses are captured by sensors and converted, through algorithms, into perceptible sensations. The electronic circuitry, wiring, and sensor arrays are directly exposed to the audience in the open space, making the technical aspects themselves part of the visual field.
From a methodological standpoint, the most important feature of Intimacy.zip is the translation of emotional experience into technical structures and data flows. Emotion is no longer expressed through images or narrative. Instead, it is captured through sensors, encoded into signals, and converted into feedback loops. This method opens up new possibilities. The viewer is no longer merely an observer but becomes a synthetic part of the system.
Intimacy.zip also appears as a thought-provoking critical reflection on a life mediated by technologies. A sensor can record a heartbeat, but it cannot measure the emotional weight carried by the heart. By making this gap between technological abstraction and a lived body visible, through the open circuitry, the exposed wiring, the numbers standing in for something far more difficult to name, the work points to what is lost when experience is translated into data. The viewer becomes aware of their physiological state, though which hopefully they are aware of their own bodily resonance. What the system captures is accurate, but incomplete, in a way that no more advanced device could fix. This is exactly the condition that the work is examining and reflecting on.
In Loading Enlightenment..., Shen's practice shifts again by working directly with e-waste as her material – old circuit boards, wires, resistors, and miscellaneous electronic components.
These materials are arranged into a circular geometric structure, resembling a mandala. The crafting process demands extensive manual labour. The artist sorts, arranges, and modifies electronic parts of varying shapes and sizes, one by one, into a stable geometric order.
This way of working is similar to a manual collage or a kind of material weaving. The electronic parts were originally functional objects, but here they are completely stripped of functionality. They no longer serve their intended purposes but become purely visual elements.
The visual work operates on two levels. On the one hand, the electronic components form an intricate, saturated texture; on the other, the geometric structure imposes a sense of order. Complexity and order coexist within a single image, respectively producing two distinct visual experiences at close range and from a distance.
This form, however, also creates an obvious tension. When e-waste is arranged into a highly symmetrical geometric structure, the original messiness and fragmentation of the materials are weakened. The material histories and traces of past uses embedded in the components are absorbed into a very stable visual order. This treatment makes the work easier to look at, but it also partially softens the materials' roughness. Put differently, once reorganised, the materials become more beautiful yet also appear ‘safer’.
Despite the clear differences in medium across the three works, they share a continuous ethos. In Peeping Bloom, Shen explores material fluidity through the shaping of resin. In Intimacy.zip, she explores bodily resonance through electronic sensor systems. In Loading Enlightenment..., she constructs geometric structures through material assemblage. These three methods correspond to three distinct modes of production: sculpture, systems-based installation, and material reconfiguration. Shen's practice reveals a persistent experimental tendency. She remains focused on one question: how can an inaccessible experience be made perceptible through materiality?
The flow of resin, the loop of information feedback, and the arrangement of electronic fragments are all different answers to that question.
These methods have not been solidified into a unified style, yet they read as a continuous experimental path under development.
It is precisely in this ongoing process of change that her work remains open. It does not fully belong to traditional sculpture or to technological art, but seeks innovative forms in the space between the two.
