In the project 60 wrd/min art critic, writer Lori Waxman explores how art writing can serve an expanded field of artists-including those incarcerated, trying to gain visas, working to establish themselves professionally, or just wanting feedback for a secret hobby. For this iteration, Waxman reviews two recent projects by Chicago-based artist Amo (Mengying) Zeng. Amo (Mengying) Zeng So much of great consequence is invisible to the naked eye, from cellular structure to air quality, defense contracting to water rights. Beijing artist Amo (Mengying) Zeng, currently living and working in Chicago, makes sensitive use of technology to render two such situations more legible. Embodied Intelligence is a small, simple machine into which prompts can be entered. Artificial intelligence will generate the answer, but only once viewers produce the required energy by turning a crank on the side of the device. Presto, the criminally underrecognized environmental impact of even the most basic AI task becomes tangible. Imagine if every cellphone had one. A Book of Diaspora/Disquiet is a stack of paper, mostly the kind of forms noncitizens must fill out in order to stay in the United States for any length of time. The top sheet is different, a scattering of type that seems at first to constitute what a person might seek here: immigrant, driver’s license, certainty, coffee table, work hard, university, luxurious, job, American Dream. But then other words temporarily appear, written with projected light in between the printed ones, filling in the gaps with distress and failure, uncertainty and instability. That is the truth, momentarily seen. -Lori Waxman 2025-11-21 3: 03 PM.
https://chicagoreader.com/visual-arts/amo-zeng/
Art and tech, mediated through human gesture
