ZISHI TU(Yuxi Chen)
Mix Media, Installation
3D Art
Zishi Tu(Yuxi Chen) is a London-based Installation Artist and 3D Artist. Her 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 a “Second 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.
Her mechanical and digital works have been presented at the V&A Digital Design Weekend, the British Embassy in Paris, Strait Culture Art Center in Fuzhou.
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Codename: O
Mechanical Installations
Codename: O is a mechanical installation and the latest work in the Second World series. The work returns to a single character while deepening the relationship between observation, fragmentation, and nonhuman existence. O continuously separates and reconstructs itself, allowing its scattered components to form a recognisable figure only for a fleeting moment. When it reappears, another face, emotion, or state has already emerged. O is both an object observed from the Original World and an observer looking back from the Second World. The work presents recognition as a temporary encounter between two realities, neither of which can perceive the other as complete.
July 2026
Wood, Resin, servos
Arduino, Fusion 360, Blender
50 x 50 x 15 cm
Codename: O continues a series initiated by Codename: J and expanded through Codename: F. Codename: J introduced the idea of the “Second World” through a single servo-driven character whose body repeatedly folded and unfolded between a human-like figure and a stack of geometric forms. Codename: F extended this idea into four interconnected mechanical installations, transforming the movement of individual characters into a larger, continuously changing environment. Codename: O returns to a single figure, focusing more closely on the unstable encounter between the character and those observing it.
Through its programmed mechanical choreography, O continuously separates and reconstructs itself. Most of the time, the audience encounters only scattered shapes, partial movements and disconnected visual signals. At a particular moment, these fragments align and form a recognisable figure. This image remains visible only briefly before breaking apart again.
When O next reassembles, it presents a different face and emotional state. The two expressions embedded in the work do not create a straightforward narrative or a fixed progression from one emotion to another. Instead, they emerge through repetition, making identity appear temporary and dependent upon the moment in which the character is perceived. Recognition becomes an event rather than a stable image.
O is an inhabitant of the Second World, an alternative reality constructed through machines, computation, fictional characters and internal systems. These characters are not representations of species from our world. They are nonhuman beings with their own conditions of existence, observing the Original World from another reality.
This produces a reciprocal relationship between the installation and its audience. The viewer watches O as it repeatedly becomes visible and disappears, while O appears to look back at the viewer through its changing faces. Neither side can perceive the other completely. Each encounters the other through incomplete images, temporary alignments and fragments.
This produces a reciprocal relationship between the installation and its audience. The viewer watches O as it repeatedly becomes visible and disappears, while O appears to look back at the viewer through its changing faces. Neither side can perceive the other completely. Each encounters the other through incomplete images, temporary alignments and fragments.
The mechanical structure is therefore not simply a system used to animate or display the character. It constitutes O’s body and determines how O can exist, move and communicate. Its repetitive motion is not a performance added to a static sculpture; it is the character’s fundamental state of being.
Through the contrast between its cute appearance and exposed mechanical logic, Codename: O brings softness, vulnerability and emotional recognition into contact with repetition, calculation and control. Rather than moving towards a final or complete form, O remains within an endless cycle of assembly and collapse.
The work asks how identity can be formed when coherence is only temporary. If we can perceive another being only through fragments, can recognition, empathy or connection still take place? Codename: O locates this possibility in the fleeting moment when two realities appear to look back at one another.
The work asks how identity can be formed when coherence is only temporary. If we can perceive another being only through fragments, can recognition, empathy or connection still take place? Codename: O locates this possibility in the fleeting moment when two realities appear to look back at one another.
The work asks how identity can be formed when coherence is only temporary. If we can perceive another being only through fragments, can recognition, empathy or connection still take place? Codename: O locates this possibility in the fleeting moment when two realities appear to look back at one another.
