The Paradox of Anxiety 

By Jie Deng, Bingjie Gao, Xinjun Gong, Tianyang Ji, Zhigang Wang

Installation & Interactive Art

We breathe digital life into the Taoist deities preserved in the thousand-year-old murals of Yongle Palace. Restored with precision, these ancient figures are reanimated through generative AI, transcending the bounds of time and space. When participants grasp the electronic wooden fish and complete a cyber prayer ritual in sync with pulsating lights, AI-forged gods of wealth, scholarship, and matrimony materialize, their movements governed by algorithmic choreography. These virtual deities are artifacts of our technological era. Shaped by machine learning, their distorted forms reveal not only new gods of the digital age but also fractured reflections of human longing. The rhythms embedded in the cyber ritual expose the paradoxes of contemporary life: the craving for rest within relentless acceleration, the tension between spiritual release and material pursuit. As technology gamifies prayer and personalizes deities, a deeper reality surfaces. These pixelated gods offer no redemption. Yet in their vacant gaze and mechanical dance, they lay bare the anxieties and contradictions that define our blurred existence.