ZISHI TU(Yuxi Chen)
Mix Media, Installation
3D Art
Zishi Tu(Yuxi Chen) is a London-based Creative Technologist and 3D Artist whose practice explores the construction of imaginary worlds through cuteness, mythology, play, and dark fantasy. Working across interactive installation, pen plotter painting, visual games, animation, and 3D digital media, she creates characters and environments that exist between tenderness and unease.
Her work centres on the idea of building an alternative world through cute characters. These figures inhabit strange, playful, and sometimes unsettling spaces, inviting audiences to enter a world where softness becomes powerful, and cuteness becomes a language for storytelling, transformation, and resistance.
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Codename: F
Mechanical Installations
Codename:F is a collection of 4 medium-sized mechanical installations, combining cute characters to construct a real-time changing spectacle. Each installation will continuously perform its own repetitive choreographic movements, independent yet interconnected, including visual fusion and data correlation.
Sep 2024
Wood, Resin, servos
Arduino, Fusion 360, Blender
Codename: F imagines the possibility of a Second World: a world equivalent to our own, but generated entirely through computation. I call our universe the Original World, while the Second World is a constructed reality built by computers, machines, characters, and systems.
The project begins from a philosophical question: if Leibniz believed that our world is “the best of all possible worlds,” chosen by God, what happens when possible worlds are no longer divine creations, but computational processes? If every possible world can be understood as a different set of rules running through something like a cellular automaton, then God becomes less like a perfect creator and more like a world-machine, operating as a form of Turing machine. From this perspective, the Original World may not be the best or most complete world, but only one contingent result among many possible computational outcomes.
Against this uncertainty, Codename: F proposes the Second World as a pure computable world: a world without the undecidable, the unknowable, or the uncomputable. It is not simply a digital copy of reality, but a speculative environment where logic, perception, and matter are reorganized through mechanical movement and computational rules.
Continuing the concepts and technologies developed in Codename: J, this project constructs an environment inhabited by my characters. Cuteness becomes the visual language of this world. Soft colours, rounded forms, playful expressions, and toy-like bodies create an immediate sense of attraction and intimacy, inviting the audience to enter the work through pleasure, curiosity, and emotional recognition. However, this cuteness is not only decorative. It acts as a mask, a lure, and a system of communication. Beneath the charming surfaces are mechanical structures, computational logic, repetitive movements, and unstable processes of assembly and collapse.
The audience enters as both observer and observed, stepping into a space where meaning is never fully stable. At first, they encounter only fragments: scattered shapes, disjointed movements, partial objects, and incomplete signals. As the characters begin to move, assemble, and perform, these fragments momentarily form recognizable objects or scenes. Yet just as recognition becomes possible, the image dissolves again, returning to a state of fragmentation.
The audience enters as both observer and observed, stepping into a space where meaning is never fully stable. At first, they encounter only fragments: scattered shapes, disjointed movements, partial objects, and incomplete signals. As the characters begin to move, assemble, and perform, these fragments momentarily form recognizable objects or scenes. Yet just as recognition becomes possible, the image dissolves again, returning to a state of fragmentation.
Through this constant cycle of assembly and collapse, Codename: F explores how worlds are made, perceived, and lost. By using cuteness as a surface language for complex systems, the project creates a tension between innocence and machinery, emotional appeal and logical structure, softness and control. It asks whether reality is something stable that we discover, or something temporarily generated through systems of observation, movement, and computation.
Technical Implementation
In the design of the mechanical structure, I largely followed the design process from "Codename: J." I first created rough sketches in Motion Gen, then moved on to Fusion to produce a complete animation simulation. After that, all the structures were either laser-cut or 3D printed. As an inexperienced carpenter with limited professional skills, reducing the amount of manual work helped to avoid many errors, such as cutting with a saw or drilling holes with a power drill.
Mechanical Design
- Mechanical Draft01: Basic movement designed in Motion gen.
- Mechanical Draft02: Remaking mechanical structures and simulate movement in Fusion 360.
Prototypes
- Mechanical Final: Simulating all movements motivated by servos and stepper motors. And write these movements in Arduino, I used seeduino Xiao for this project.
- Prototype01: Driven by servos, all the arms are laser-cut and assembled with bearings.
- Prototype02: An ordinary chair, punctured and restructured, becomes a artwork merged with other mechanical structure.
Character design
Modelling and Sculpting in Blender
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Airbrush Painting
- Modeling in Blender: The characters: F are designed and modeled in Blender.
- 3D print: Then the characters are 3D print with a resin printer.
- Airbrush Paint: The parts were painted with an airbrush and acrylics, with over 50 individually colored components in total.