Born in China and raised in a multicultural environment, including formative years in Morocco, Youwei Luo eventually settled in London, where his artistic practice continues to expand in scope and ambition. His early fascination with form and silhouette developed into a commitment to visual experimentation, initially through drawing and image-making, and later through sculpture and computational arts. This trajectory reflects a persistent search for abstraction and freedom, where traditional materials and digital technologies intersect to open new avenues of expression.
Youwei’s practice centres on the fragile boundaries between the artificial and the organic, exploring how bodies, systems, and materials mutate in response to one another. Drawing on post-human and post-anthropocentric theory, his work questions what it means to exist in a world of perpetual flux, where distinctions between life and machine, nature and culture, are increasingly unstable. Employing computational processes, 3D printing, and organic matter, he produces hybrid objects and installations that resist easy categorisation. These works often carry an uncanny quality, inviting viewers into a space where familiarity and estrangement coexist, and where symbolic resonances emerge in fragmented layers. Central to his approach is an engagement with materiality and metamorphosis, through which Youwei explores the possibilities of growth, resilience, and transformation in uncertain futures.
Grid, Grain, Growth (2024)
Grid, Grain, Growth translates the friction of sand and ambient sound into restless digital vectors, creating patterns that shift between harmony and turbulence. Watching them, I thought of dunes disturbed by wind or waves breaking apart mid-flow, both fragile and alive.
The work does not rely on spectacle. It emphasises interdependence, with sound generating form and form in turn reanimating material. This feels like a quiet challenge to the hierarchy that often privileges the digital over the physical. Here, sand and image coexist as equals, inseparable from one another.
At its core, the piece meditates on growth, not as a steady, triumphant trajectory but as something fragile and contingent. The vectors sprout, scatter, and collapse, echoing the instability through which resilience emerges. The interplay between matter and signal makes the work compelling, showing transformation as something born from friction, precarious yet persistently alive.
neOrigin (2025)
Sculpture
3D print PLA, Animal bones, Metal fixture
With neOrigin, Youwei imagines a creature born from an alternate evolutionary path, where the categories of organic and technological have collapsed into one another. Constructed from 3D-printed vertebrae and repurposed animal bones that he collected while walking along the Thames, the hybrid skeleton is at once familiar and alien. There is something quietly unsettling about it, as though this species evolved in the shadows of our own history. Its metallic fixtures and fractured skull suggest a body caught in perpetual metamorphosis, unsettled within an unstable ecological order.
The work challenges conventional taxonomies, positioning itself in the liminal space between the grotesque and the sublime. Its skeletal form recalls museum specimens and evolutionary diagrams, while its fabrication points toward a post-anthropocentric future in which life emerges from the fusion of matter and machine. In this sense, neOrigin functions as both a speculative proposition and a sculpture, asking what beings might evolve once biology and technology are no longer separate. I found myself lingering over the details of the bones, intrigued by how something so fragile can feel simultaneously raw, historical, and futuristic.
Tension permeates its presence. The creature’s fractured body evokes extinction’s ruin while simultaneously suggesting resilience and adaptation. References to Noah’s Ark and Darwinian theory underline this ambiguity, blending preservation and transformation in a single figure. The result is uncanny yet compelling, and I felt drawn into the paradox it embodies, which is a reminder that life may always have been more hybrid and entangled than our neat categories allow.
The Crucible of Magdeburg (2025)
Sculpture
3D print PLA, Animal bones, Arduino, Water pumps, Metal fixtures
In The Crucible of Magdeburg, Youwei extends his exploration of speculative lifeforms, imagining an evolutionary arc in which organisms and machines are no longer separate but entangled. The hybrid carcass, evoking the washed-up remains of a vast marine creature, appears both organic and engineered, threaded with tubing, wires, and skeletal fragments. Rather than presenting death as final, the sculpture insists on circulation and exchange: fluids move through the system, saturating its parts in a cycle that suggests reproduction as a porous, ongoing process.
What distinguishes this work is its refusal of Darwinian linearity. Instead of inheritance through genes alone, Youwei proposes symbiosis, collaboration, and fluid entanglement as the forces driving change. Influences from Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis and Donna Haraway’s companion species thinking are evident, reframing evolution as dialogue rather than competition. This approach destabilises anthropocentric categories, opening up the possibility of life as continual negotiation between matter, code, memory, and decay.
The imagery is haunting yet poetic. The carcass recalls industrial damage to marine ecosystems while also hinting at emergent futures where technology and biology grow together. It occupies a threshold between ruin and regeneration, between the dead and the not-yet-formed. There is a quiet grandeur in this entanglement: the grotesque remnants of a whale-like form become a site of speculative resilience, a crucible in which new modes of existence might take shape.
In this work, Youwei transforms decomposition into a language of possibility. The Crucible of Magdeburg suggests that evolution is neither linear nor strictly biological, but a process of mutual becoming, where life continually rewrites itself through frictions, failures, and hybrid alliances.
Taken together, the series offers a vision of a world both unstable and generative, where boundaries between nature and culture, machine and organism, the living and the dead dissolve. These works invite reflection on a post-anthropocentric perspective, in which the grotesque potential of hybrid forms becomes not a threat, but a provocation, encouraging reconsideration of resilience, adaptation, and the possible futures of life itself.
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