As daily life becomes increasingly mediated through screens and data streams, London-based visual artist Peiyan Xuprobes how technology reshapes perception itself. His practice spans 3D design, moving image, installation, and visual communication, building immersive systems that examine what it means to see, sense, and understand in an information-saturated age.
Smog (2025)
A standout example is Smog (2025), which earned a Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design and was recently presented at Photofusion Gallery in London.
The work begins with an investigation into air pollution—how dust, smoke, and industrial emissions accumulate to reduce visibility and degrade health. Collecting data from multiple locations, Xu transforms environmental metrics—wind speed, traffic density, time of day—into accessible visual expression.
Beyond environmental mapping, Smog reflects a larger cultural condition: a world where images and information constantly flicker, overlap, and obscure understanding. Xu asks what it means to see when our vision is filtered through an endless stream of digital mediation.
At Photofusion, this inquiry takes form in a layered, immersive installation where translucent materials, shifting projections, and ambient light destabilize visual clarity. Perception becomes both subject and challenge.
Primordial Realm (2025)
Xu extends this investigation with Primordial Realm (2025), an interactive virtual environment showcased at the London Design Festival.
Visitors navigate a sequence of surreal environments, each representing a different stage of information culture. The journey begins in a mirrored violet void filled with spiraling screens, moves into a structured landscape of evolving humanoid figures exchanging coded knowledge, and ends in a vast, chaotic red expanse—an allegory for today’s oversaturated digital terrain.
Part game, part critique, Primordial Realm blurs the boundaries between physical and virtual space, questioning how digital information alters behavior, memory, and belief.
Toward a New Visual Consciousness
Across these works, Xu situates perception as an active, shifting arena. While Smog reframes environmental research through sensory experience, Primordial Realm underscores how rapidly expanding information networks reorganize human consciousness.
Xu’s practice aligns with a broader artistic movement examining post-humanist perspectives—where technology and the body are increasingly intertwined. Comparable conversations appear in the work of artists such as Felicity Hammond, whose series Variations traces the origins and consequences of generative AI, noting how “the image begins to unravel.”
Similarly, Xu reveals how digital systems not only influence how we see, but how we think, move, and exist.
