Sheung Yiu

To look at a portrait is to read a face. To engage in a speculative exercise.

 

Across Eastern and Western cultures, societies have developed ways to predict a person's character through facial features. In East Asian cultures, the esoteric practice of face reading promises the power to see into one's future through facial analysis. Though face reading remains largely a folk belief, many continue to seek the occult power of predictions from face readers. In the West, the forgotten pseudoscience of physiognomy, combined with statistics and machine learning, re-enters our modern lives as facial recognition algorithms, perpetuating societal biases and individual prejudices.

In this project, Sheung Yiu subjects his face to various predictive processes, namely Western physiognomy, Eastern face reading, facial recognition, facial phenotyping, facial generation, and synthetic facial data. He blends the visual language of the occult in face reading with the "scientific" aesthetic of facial recognition to blur the lines between these practices from the East and West.

 

Ultimately, a face is more than just a face. It is an interface of predictions trapped between two analytical frameworks and cosmological views that are not as different as they initially seem.