# De Shanshui

Canonical URL: https://baoyangchen.com/works/de-shanshui/
Interactive page: https://baoyangchen.com/#work/de-shanshui
Year: 2014-2025
Category: AI Generative Works
Medium: Artificial intelligence algorithm generated video

## Proposition
A model learns shanshui as memory, then returns the landscape as a new image tradition.

## Description
De Shanshui begins with one of the oldest image forms in Chinese art: mountain and water painting. Chen approaches this tradition through AI and machine learning, treating the model not as a style filter but as a way to absorb, fracture, and recompose inherited pictorial language.

The work links machine learning to the practice of copying. In Chinese painting, copying is a path of study, memory, and transformation. Here, the trained model becomes a contemporary site of that process.

The generated works are printed on Chinese silk. The surface matters. Silk brings the pixel grid back into contact with a traditional material, letting digital image and cultural memory meet in physical form.

## Viewer Entry
The viewer encounters images that seem to remember landscape without returning to a single historical picture. Forms collide, perspectives blur, seals and fragments drift from their original contexts. The image carries the trace of a tradition that has been learned by another kind of system.

## Apparatus
Chen feeds images of classical shanshui into a custom AI model. Through training, the model identifies patterns, structures, and visual rules, then generates new compositions. The process extends the logic of copying into algorithmic form. The final images are presented on silk, where the woven surface echoes the grid and texture of digital construction.

## Sections
### Shanshui as Source
The work starts from landscape painting as a cultural structure, not simply a visual style. Mountain, water, atmosphere, seal, composition, and empty space become material for algorithmic transformation.

### Copying and Training
Traditional copying teaches through repetition and internalization. Model training extends that relation into computation, where inherited forms become learned structures.

### Image After Landscape
The generated images do not restore the past. They loosen it. Familiar elements separate from their original order and return as new pictorial space.

### Silk Surface
Printing on silk keeps the work connected to the material history of Chinese painting. The image is digital, but its surface carries another memory.

### Authorship and Model
De Shanshui shifts attention from output to process. The trained model becomes part of the artwork's authorship, a compressed field of the artist's choices, rules, and inherited images.

## Images
1. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/02-6e6d50de-DeShanShui_WuHan_Web.jpg - AI-generated shanshui image printed on Chinese silk.
2. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/03-5ed086ac-BCHEN_10.jpg - Detail of silk texture, where digital image and traditional support meet.
3. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/04-06778dcb-BCHEN_11.jpg - Multiple generated landscapes show how the model recomposes inherited pictorial rules.
4. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/01-c70f0505-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_001_01_75.jpg - Seals, landscape forms, and tonal fragments detach from their historical settings and enter a new composition.
5. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/05-a0139261-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_002_02_32.jpg - Portfolio spread from the De Shanshui section, documenting the project's long-running development.
6. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/06-7191c70f-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_003_04_69.jpg
7. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/07-e0f1aa89-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_004_05_12.jpg
8. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/08-882f5a57-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_005_05_66.jpg
9. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/09-8a05a84a-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_006_05_106.jpg
10. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/10-2fdb32eb-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_007_02_77.jpg
11. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/11-f2d145fa-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_008_05_52.jpg
12. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/12-3f0b9f55-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_009_02_08.jpg
13. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/13-d6644056-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_010_05_22.jpg
14. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/14-85028033-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_011_04_66.jpg
15. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/15-c7cddaf0-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_012_04_65.jpg
16. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/16-9578973a-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_013_02_34.jpg
17. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/17-4f306b76-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_014_02_50.jpg
18. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/18-c7c2cc3f-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_015_03_15.jpg
19. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/19-5efc917b-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_016_02_74.jpg
20. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/20-414da257-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_017_05_60.jpg
21. https://baoyangchen.com/original-site-media/de-shanshui/21-bd868092-baoyang_chen_deshanshui_018_03_62.jpg

## Videos
No video listed.

## Source Pages
- https://baoyangchen.com/De-Shan-Shui-Works