Automatism Studio is an art group established in 2023. The term "automatism" originates from physiology, describing bodily movements not under conscious control. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud utilized free association and unconscious drawing or writing to explore patients' unconscious psychology and subconscious. As creators, we explore individual and collective behaviors in states of unconsciousness from an artistic perspective. Through visual mediums such as images, installations, and videographs, we aim to document phenomena that escape deliberate actions and conscious intentions.
Website / Link to Portfolio: https://automatism.cargo.site/
Publication/Work:
《Spirit Away》
As the inaugural photography publication from our studio, we directed our focus toward the You Shen (游神) rituals in eastern Fujian. During the 2024 Spring Festival, two members of our team visited townships in Minhou and Changle, Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, and engaged in a two-week documentation project. Upon entering the procession, we, as outsiders, felt both detached and disoriented, unlike the locals. Guided by intuition, we pressed the shutter, capturing moments while striving to understand the essence of this grand tradition. More than a mere observation of folk customs, we aimed to convey a personal interpretation of local culture through imagery.
"Looking at the faces of the Ta Gu (塔骨) in the procession, I felt a mix of familiarity and strangeness, reminiscent of the deity statues I had seen during temple visits with my elders in childhood. I followed the procession, capturing the faces beneath the Ta Gu from the perspective of an outsider." — Wenhao Zhou
"Recalling the first night I witnessed the You Shen, I walked along a dimly lit rural path, guided by the sound of firecrackers, slowly making my way toward the procession. Suddenly, the towering, slightly disproportionate deity statues, waving their arms, came into view, accompanied by the thunderous beats of drums and gongs and the melodies sung in the local dialect. The air was thick with a mist-like ash from the fireworks. For someone who grew up in the city, the scene felt like something out of a dream." — Ruishen Hong
As creators from a different cultural background, we sought to document each procession from an outsider’s perspective. We immersed ourselves in the You Shen queue, moving with the crowd in a state of detachment, heading into the unknown. In this book, we use fragmented images to reconstruct the You Shen scenes as witnessed through the eyes of observers.
《Zine 01》
This is a zine composed of plant images, AI-generated encyclopedic information through image recognition, and simple line drawings.
Through post-production arrangement and processing, the relationship between natural and man-made objects in the zine becomes ambiguous and blurred, forming a new kind of “natural system.”
One example is an image in the book that was incorrectly identified by the AI—the fuzzy center of a sago palm was mistaken for a mallard duck. Due to their similar color regions, such visual confusions are ubiquitous in daily life and subtly influence the way we think.
By using plants (naturally growing organisms) as carriers, I deconstructed and recombined plant images through the juxtaposition of textures and encyclopedic data. Through these reassembled photographs, I aim to explore the impact of human intervention or artificial generation on our visual perception and the reflections that follow.
《0123416》
In my impression of Shanghai, everything seems to be in a state of constant flux—the newly renovated storefronts along the streets, the buildings being torn down and rebuilt. Just like the white paint brushed onto the outer walls of houses awaiting demolition, everything feels like it can start over again. As I gaze upon these reconstructed “representations,” I wonder: can people still recall the scenes that once existed on this land?
Perhaps before a certain shop was remodeled, a family had lived in that cramped space for decades. Or maybe before a high-rise office building stood here, there was once a neighborhood, and under a large tree at its center, vendors, shoe repairmen, and card-playing uncles would gather. For them, that tree was like a symbolic monument—a collective vessel of memory. And those memories, like the dust kicked up by an excavator, vanished into the sunlit air, gradually forgotten.
Most of my memories of this city seem to reside in my early childhood, when my mother used to take me to the parks and along the streets. When I see children’ s spontaneous doodles on the walls, or those seemingly nonsensical numbers, I think perhaps these so-called “symbols” might become keys to memory—like a hidden scale in the torrent of recollection, striking us in a sudden moment after we’ ve grown up.
Walking through these places—at once familiar and unfamiliar—the scenes before my eyes flicker between clarity and blur, like bubbles, dust, water stains, sunlight, and shifting winds. They exist in a dreamlike state, filled with uncertainty. To me, much of beauty lies in such fleeting moments. Just like the tree at the heart of the community, photographs too can serve as vessels of shared memory, capable of evoking the parts of ourselves we once lost.
《JiaMa》
Jia Ma, also known as paper horse or Jia Ma paper, is an ancient and mysterious woodcut print used in folk rituals for blessing, disaster relief, and worship. It is popular in various regions of Yunnan, with the Bai ethnic group’s Jia Ma being the most distinctive, also referred to as “paper talismans.”
During the Han and Jin dynasties, Jia Ma paper, as a folk religious cultural phenomenon, spread to the border areas of Yunnan and became widely circulated in Dali.
The ethnic groups in the Dali region that use Jia Ma include the Bai, Yi, Han, and others. Among the many deities worshipped by these ethnic groups, the Bai’s “Ben Zhu” (local deity), the Yi’s “Tu Zhu” (earth deity), and the Jia Ma from Han culture have been absorbed and integrated into each other, adding a rich ethnic and religious color to the Jia Ma tradition in Dali. Currently, there are over 600 traditional Jia Ma designs in the Dali region, primarily used for purposes such as blessing for peace, attracting wealth and good fortune, praying for children, education, marriage, driving away evil spirits, ancestor worship, local deity worship, Buddhist (Taoist) deities, natural mountain and river blessings, road, bridge, and building construction, family harmony, as well as celebrations and funerals.
This book, created by Bai Jia Ma inheritor Zhang Ruilong through hand-carved printing, collects more than 360 pieces of Jia Ma paper talismans.
《Plant Portraits》
“Plant Portraits” collected Ge’s tree-themed paintings in the past two years.
This series of paintings started in the summer of 2020, when the daily life of the whole world was changed due to the epidemic. There is no academic and social interaction, but a lot of time to watch. Just watching, past and present.
When those grand narratives can’t fill the holes in daily life, the small visual fragments can weave a net like vines. The tree outside the house, the tree in the photo, the tree that gave me shelter. I stared at them with interest, and this kind of watching went through a process from enthusiasm to calmness, gradually getting farther away from reality and closer to myself.
《Minnan Exit》
Since 2015, Wen-You Cai has returned on multiple occasions to her parents’ hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian, to attend the funerals of her deceased relatives. The ceremonies in the Minnan region unfold like grand dramas in which she is both an observer and a participant. Throughout the ceremony, Wen-You is enveloped in the unknown; everything seems meticulously arranged. Amidst the overwhelming grief of losing loved ones, there exists a feeling of confusion, and taking photographs was one of the ways for her to engage in the funeral process. For this photo series, Wen-You was initially confronted by her own fear of death, intertwined with her bewilderment and curiosity about the complex funeral rituals and its uniqueness inherent to Minnan culture. To demystify these subjects, Wen-You, joined by te editions, interviewed a funeral director who provides comprehensive “one-stop services,” a monk who hosts Buddhist ceremonies, and a folklorist of Minnan rituals. Minnan Exit can be interpreted as many things–a family album, a curated collection of photographs, an unfinished journey of discovery, as well as the process of Wen-You’s reconciliation with her mortality. Minnan Exit was designed by an independent graphic design studio, RELATED DEPARTMENT. Through the artist’s lens, the design team sought inspiration from funeral objects and rituals, to create a visual concept for the publication’s structure and layout with the regional characteristics of Minnan.
《Tears and the audience》
This book documents texts and images from the audience series in the exhibition (Cai Caibei: Tears and the audience):”The person you see does not exist because you see them; they exist because they are looking at you.”When you are watching a film, the film is looking back at the audience. But rather than being like a mirror, it is more like an echo. There exists a delay and distortion between them, rather than an exact replication. Like the ancients who wore masks for rituals, they hid their faces to get closer to their prey. The audience sitting in the cinema is similar to the ancients, their faces and bodies are wrapped in darkness, and only the features lit up by the screen are visible. Please take your seats and freely continue the stories of these characters. The design uses an exhibition-supporting typeface and the act of the cinema chair being turned down, sat down and watched by the viewer to link the relationship between image and text. The focus of the book shifts from the film itself, which is the dominant subject most of the time, to the people who watch the images, and the author uses nineteen images and texts to rewrite and draw fictionalised versions of different characters that appear in the cinema scene.
《Kalika me Lama》
“Kalika me Lama” which means “silk and light” in Hawaiian. Hanayo, who visited the land of Hawaii, met there with the culture and nature that were once richly rooted in Hawaii. Face Hawaii’s illusions and reality through contact with people working to restore the lost culture. In this tiny little photo book, sisters, parents and children, and mysterious plants wearing silk KALIKA hula costumes are captured in the light of Hawaii in this place with a complex history.
Hanayo visited Molokai, which is said to be the birthplace of hula, and Hana, which is located at the eastern end of Maui. On Molokai, two beautiful sisters are dancing at the beach. The leaves of the lei poo (rei on the head) that they wear on their heads are essential plants for Hawaiians every day. The occasional fantastic forest is Paraau State Park, where Farrick Rock is located, and was once a sacred place where only the royal family was allowed to enter. The story of Hawaii and hula, which connects the past and the present, is spelled out by an image that is a mixture of nostalgia and fantasy that awakens the memory of sleeping deeply.
《M/E》
Upon visiting Iceland in 2019, Kawauchi encountered geysers like the breadths of Earth, glaciers surpassing human time, and the inner space of a dormant volcano that was reminiscent of the inside of a womb. She had thus experienced the connection to this planet she had never felt before. Iceland was her point of departure; she continued to experience similar sights such as the nature around her home after the COVID-19 pandemic and the winter land of Hokkaido. She opened her majestic solo exhibition “M/E On this sphere Endlessly interlinking” and showcased a fraction of the “M/E” series. Even today, this body of work is been exhibited around the world.
The title “M/E” comes from the first letters of the words “Mother” and “Earth”, “Mother Earth” if read in sequence, and also hints at the word “Me”. It reminds us of the certainty that nature as an infinite existence and the small ubiquitous occurrences from our daily lives are not unrelated, but inseparably connected. As the most recent body of work by Kawauchi who returned to her point of origin –the connection between nature and human beings– and thus took a different look at the world during this turbulent time, this series goes beyond “Ametsuchi” and “Halo” through which she had established her perspective by contemplating nature. Bound by Hans Gremmen, the book appears to be a singular book object. A beautifully written essay, the like of a heartfelt letter, by author, photographer, and art historian Teju Cole concludes this publication.
《光に住み着く》
This publication is structured as a dialogue of texts and photographs. Rinko Kawauchi replies with photographs to the text by the philosopher Masatake Shinohara, which is again responded to by Shinohara’s words. Upon writing, Shinohara says that he repeatedly recalled Kawauchi’s words: “what is important about a photo is the way one takes it, rather than what one takes.”
“In reality, we experience something. When we experience that something, it is important to ask how it came into existence in this world. (…) As I continued the exchange with Kawauchi, I came to the realization that what was at stake in the responses to the photographs was the act of directing the movements of thought towards the dimension in which things happen: that is, the place from which reality emerges. Such a dimension lies hidden behind the surface of the everyday world in which we ordinarily live.” – from the afterward. There, you will see the different sensations and emotions surfacing from the photographs, and the line of thought unfolding through such manifestations are given life as words. The text and photography interrelate to explore the depths of “light” as a subject.
What does it mean to imagine the place where we are? This entails, first of all, an awareness of the fact that we are located “somewhere.” That is, to exist means to live within a certain site, but where we are is “somewhere.” And what if we humans happen to exist within the vastness of our natural surroundings? Even though the place where we are is a stable, artificial human construction, it is nothing more than an impermanent domain, adrift on the surface of so-called nature.
Automatism Studio
Automatism Studio is an art group established in 2023. The term "automatism" originates from physiology, describing bodily movements not under conscious control. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud utilized free association and unconscious drawing or writing to explore patients' unconscious psychology and subconscious. As creators, we explore individual and collective behaviors in states of unconsciousness from an artistic perspective. Through visual mediums such as images, installations, and videographs, we aim to document phenomena that escape deliberate actions and conscious intentions.
《Spirit Away》
As the inaugural photography publication from our studio, we directed our focus toward the You Shen (游神) rituals in eastern Fujian. During the 2024 Spring Festival, two members of our team visited townships in Minhou and Changle, Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, and engaged in a two-week documentation project. Upon entering the procession, we, as outsiders, felt both detached and disoriented, unlike the locals. Guided by intuition, we pressed the shutter, capturing moments while striving to understand the essence of this grand tradition. More than a mere observation of folk customs, we aimed to convey a personal interpretation of local culture through imagery.
"Looking at the faces of the Ta Gu (塔骨) in the procession, I felt a mix of familiarity and strangeness, reminiscent of the deity statues I had seen during temple visits with my elders in childhood. I followed the procession, capturing the faces beneath the Ta Gu from the perspective of an outsider." — Wenhao Zhou
"Recalling the first night I witnessed the You Shen, I walked along a dimly lit rural path, guided by the sound of firecrackers, slowly making my way toward the procession. Suddenly, the towering, slightly disproportionate deity statues, waving their arms, came into view, accompanied by the thunderous beats of drums and gongs and the melodies sung in the local dialect. The air was thick with a mist-like ash from the fireworks. For someone who grew up in the city, the scene felt like something out of a dream." — Ruishen Hong
As creators from a different cultural background, we sought to document each procession from an outsider’s perspective. We immersed ourselves in the You Shen queue, moving with the crowd in a state of detachment, heading into the unknown. In this book, we use fragmented images to reconstruct the You Shen scenes as witnessed through the eyes of observers.
《Zine 01》
This is a zine composed of plant images, AI-generated encyclopedic information through image recognition, and simple line drawings.
Through post-production arrangement and processing, the relationship between natural and man-made objects in the zine becomes ambiguous and blurred, forming a new kind of “natural system.”
One example is an image in the book that was incorrectly identified by the AI—the fuzzy center of a sago palm was mistaken for a mallard duck. Due to their similar color regions, such visual confusions are ubiquitous in daily life and subtly influence the way we think.
By using plants (naturally growing organisms) as carriers, I deconstructed and recombined plant images through the juxtaposition of textures and encyclopedic data. Through these reassembled photographs, I aim to explore the impact of human intervention or artificial generation on our visual perception and the reflections that follow.
《0123416》
In my impression of Shanghai, everything seems to be in a state of constant flux—the newly renovated storefronts along the streets, the buildings being torn down and rebuilt. Just like the white paint brushed onto the outer walls of houses awaiting demolition, everything feels like it can start over again. As I gaze upon these reconstructed “representations,” I wonder: can people still recall the scenes that once existed on this land?
Perhaps before a certain shop was remodeled, a family had lived in that cramped space for decades. Or maybe before a high-rise office building stood here, there was once a neighborhood, and under a large tree at its center, vendors, shoe repairmen, and card-playing uncles would gather. For them, that tree was like a symbolic monument—a collective vessel of memory. And those memories, like the dust kicked up by an excavator, vanished into the sunlit air, gradually forgotten.
Most of my memories of this city seem to reside in my early childhood, when my mother used to take me to the parks and along the streets. When I see children’ s spontaneous doodles on the walls, or those seemingly nonsensical numbers, I think perhaps these so-called “symbols” might become keys to memory—like a hidden scale in the torrent of recollection, striking us in a sudden moment after we’ ve grown up.
Walking through these places—at once familiar and unfamiliar—the scenes before my eyes flicker between clarity and blur, like bubbles, dust, water stains, sunlight, and shifting winds. They exist in a dreamlike state, filled with uncertainty. To me, much of beauty lies in such fleeting moments. Just like the tree at the heart of the community, photographs too can serve as vessels of shared memory, capable of evoking the parts of ourselves we once lost.
《JiaMa》
Jia Ma, also known as paper horse or Jia Ma paper, is an ancient and mysterious woodcut print used in folk rituals for blessing, disaster relief, and worship. It is popular in various regions of Yunnan, with the Bai ethnic group’s Jia Ma being the most distinctive, also referred to as “paper talismans.”
During the Han and Jin dynasties, Jia Ma paper, as a folk religious cultural phenomenon, spread to the border areas of Yunnan and became widely circulated in Dali.
The ethnic groups in the Dali region that use Jia Ma include the Bai, Yi, Han, and others. Among the many deities worshipped by these ethnic groups, the Bai’s “Ben Zhu” (local deity), the Yi’s “Tu Zhu” (earth deity), and the Jia Ma from Han culture have been absorbed and integrated into each other, adding a rich ethnic and religious color to the Jia Ma tradition in Dali. Currently, there are over 600 traditional Jia Ma designs in the Dali region, primarily used for purposes such as blessing for peace, attracting wealth and good fortune, praying for children, education, marriage, driving away evil spirits, ancestor worship, local deity worship, Buddhist (Taoist) deities, natural mountain and river blessings, road, bridge, and building construction, family harmony, as well as celebrations and funerals.
This book, created by Bai Jia Ma inheritor Zhang Ruilong through hand-carved printing, collects more than 360 pieces of Jia Ma paper talismans.
《Plant Portraits》
“Plant Portraits” collected Ge’s tree-themed paintings in the past two years.
This series of paintings started in the summer of 2020, when the daily life of the whole world was changed due to the epidemic. There is no academic and social interaction, but a lot of time to watch. Just watching, past and present.
When those grand narratives can’t fill the holes in daily life, the small visual fragments can weave a net like vines. The tree outside the house, the tree in the photo, the tree that gave me shelter. I stared at them with interest, and this kind of watching went through a process from enthusiasm to calmness, gradually getting farther away from reality and closer to myself.
《Minnan Exit》
Since 2015, Wen-You Cai has returned on multiple occasions to her parents’ hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian, to attend the funerals of her deceased relatives. The ceremonies in the Minnan region unfold like grand dramas in which she is both an observer and a participant. Throughout the ceremony, Wen-You is enveloped in the unknown; everything seems meticulously arranged. Amidst the overwhelming grief of losing loved ones, there exists a feeling of confusion, and taking photographs was one of the ways for her to engage in the funeral process. For this photo series, Wen-You was initially confronted by her own fear of death, intertwined with her bewilderment and curiosity about the complex funeral rituals and its uniqueness inherent to Minnan culture. To demystify these subjects, Wen-You, joined by te editions, interviewed a funeral director who provides comprehensive “one-stop services,” a monk who hosts Buddhist ceremonies, and a folklorist of Minnan rituals. Minnan Exit can be interpreted as many things–a family album, a curated collection of photographs, an unfinished journey of discovery, as well as the process of Wen-You’s reconciliation with her mortality. Minnan Exit was designed by an independent graphic design studio, RELATED DEPARTMENT. Through the artist’s lens, the design team sought inspiration from funeral objects and rituals, to create a visual concept for the publication’s structure and layout with the regional characteristics of Minnan.
《Tears and the audience》
This book documents texts and images from the audience series in the exhibition (Cai Caibei: Tears and the audience):”The person you see does not exist because you see them; they exist because they are looking at you.”When you are watching a film, the film is looking back at the audience. But rather than being like a mirror, it is more like an echo. There exists a delay and distortion between them, rather than an exact replication. Like the ancients who wore masks for rituals, they hid their faces to get closer to their prey. The audience sitting in the cinema is similar to the ancients, their faces and bodies are wrapped in darkness, and only the features lit up by the screen are visible. Please take your seats and freely continue the stories of these characters. The design uses an exhibition-supporting typeface and the act of the cinema chair being turned down, sat down and watched by the viewer to link the relationship between image and text. The focus of the book shifts from the film itself, which is the dominant subject most of the time, to the people who watch the images, and the author uses nineteen images and texts to rewrite and draw fictionalised versions of different characters that appear in the cinema scene.
《Kalika me Lama》
“Kalika me Lama” which means “silk and light” in Hawaiian. Hanayo, who visited the land of Hawaii, met there with the culture and nature that were once richly rooted in Hawaii. Face Hawaii’s illusions and reality through contact with people working to restore the lost culture. In this tiny little photo book, sisters, parents and children, and mysterious plants wearing silk KALIKA hula costumes are captured in the light of Hawaii in this place with a complex history.
Hanayo visited Molokai, which is said to be the birthplace of hula, and Hana, which is located at the eastern end of Maui. On Molokai, two beautiful sisters are dancing at the beach. The leaves of the lei poo (rei on the head) that they wear on their heads are essential plants for Hawaiians every day. The occasional fantastic forest is Paraau State Park, where Farrick Rock is located, and was once a sacred place where only the royal family was allowed to enter. The story of Hawaii and hula, which connects the past and the present, is spelled out by an image that is a mixture of nostalgia and fantasy that awakens the memory of sleeping deeply.
《M/E》
Upon visiting Iceland in 2019, Kawauchi encountered geysers like the breadths of Earth, glaciers surpassing human time, and the inner space of a dormant volcano that was reminiscent of the inside of a womb. She had thus experienced the connection to this planet she had never felt before. Iceland was her point of departure; she continued to experience similar sights such as the nature around her home after the COVID-19 pandemic and the winter land of Hokkaido. She opened her majestic solo exhibition “M/E On this sphere Endlessly interlinking” and showcased a fraction of the “M/E” series. Even today, this body of work is been exhibited around the world.
The title “M/E” comes from the first letters of the words “Mother” and “Earth”, “Mother Earth” if read in sequence, and also hints at the word “Me”. It reminds us of the certainty that nature as an infinite existence and the small ubiquitous occurrences from our daily lives are not unrelated, but inseparably connected. As the most recent body of work by Kawauchi who returned to her point of origin –the connection between nature and human beings– and thus took a different look at the world during this turbulent time, this series goes beyond “Ametsuchi” and “Halo” through which she had established her perspective by contemplating nature. Bound by Hans Gremmen, the book appears to be a singular book object. A beautifully written essay, the like of a heartfelt letter, by author, photographer, and art historian Teju Cole concludes this publication.
《光に住み着く》
This publication is structured as a dialogue of texts and photographs. Rinko Kawauchi replies with photographs to the text by the philosopher Masatake Shinohara, which is again responded to by Shinohara’s words. Upon writing, Shinohara says that he repeatedly recalled Kawauchi’s words: “what is important about a photo is the way one takes it, rather than what one takes.”
“In reality, we experience something. When we experience that something, it is important to ask how it came into existence in this world. (…) As I continued the exchange with Kawauchi, I came to the realization that what was at stake in the responses to the photographs was the act of directing the movements of thought towards the dimension in which things happen: that is, the place from which reality emerges. Such a dimension lies hidden behind the surface of the everyday world in which we ordinarily live.” – from the afterward. There, you will see the different sensations and emotions surfacing from the photographs, and the line of thought unfolding through such manifestations are given life as words. The text and photography interrelate to explore the depths of “light” as a subject.
What does it mean to imagine the place where we are? This entails, first of all, an awareness of the fact that we are located “somewhere.” That is, to exist means to live within a certain site, but where we are is “somewhere.” And what if we humans happen to exist within the vastness of our natural surroundings? Even though the place where we are is a stable, artificial human construction, it is nothing more than an impermanent domain, adrift on the surface of so-called nature.