New York-based artist-based Spish navigates the fluid space between gathering and release with honignation, evoking the same subtlety, evoking the same subtlety that increasingly defines how we see the world today. As everything becomes digital – transformed into data and details that often concern more than independent physical conditions – the tension between the physical and the digital, and the virtual finds a visible form in the work of fish. His paintings become the documents of our time.
His latest exhibition, “the speed of habit,” which recently opened at the HDM gallery in Beijing and closes on November 22, features his most recent works. Showing them in Beijing makes their interpretation even more profitable. Today’s modern China is combined with technology that permeates everyday life, making it an apt backdrop to explore what it means to be human in the midst of a complete digital experience.
Freely mixing painting, collage and painting, fish has developed a hybrid visual language that is constantly written with questions about painting related to literal interpretation and that idea becomes a challenge itself. At the core of his practice there is an investigation not only where it is possible to have a representation but what is left of what the human body does after centuries of man after centuries of art, science and technology has returned to how we see. As Vilém Flusser suggested, images in the age of technology are no longer windows to the world but programs that rearrange our perception of it. This idea finds a silent echo in the experiments of fish with pain.
Ultimately, his work sees the passage of time and the evolution of artistic thought from renaissance to digital tools to address the circulation of images in today’s society and what it means to the world.
“My main method – how I get to things – I paint a lot – I’m very focused. So in many ways, I draw the process itself,” painting the process itself, “said the guide before the opening of the exhibition while working on this new series.
It is very interesting that the fish approaches painting, acturation and the human body with a physical awareness built behind him as a gym. In his planned and technical breaks, the body is dispersed, driven, brought together and stretched to make the movement impossible. Other works resemble studies in anatomy but push beyond the boundaries of the human form, presenting anatomies of something more than human.
His figures are stripped of their essential elements, reduced to material structures that resist scholars. For fish, this is a very interesting way of thinking about painting in a world where creativity is no longer defined by hyperrealism. “There are endless ways to make a good painting – you can plan, paint, pour – but I’m interested in investigating the machines themselves: The paint, the materials, their history,” he said.
Meeting Donna Haraway’s Cyborg manifesto And Rosi’s writing on PostHuman is the subject, the painted bodies of fish become a connection between organic life and technological expansion. As if his figures fill the screen, he is not afraid to leave empty space. He admitted: “Actually I’m more afraid of making a growing piece. The black void becomes a site of possibility, it suggests the invisible movement of the figure that can make it.
Equally interesting is his process. Fish uses AI as an interactive interface in graphic design. “I’ve been having these philosophical conversations with them — asking AI about the history of painting and how it sees the future,” he said. “It actually gives me very specific answers, where the codes are.”
Fish paintings can be read as a form of visualization of this exchange. The printed patterns embedded in the fabric are virtual codes, an interpretation of AI’s vision for the future of painting. “I combine those codes in my work. Each one comes from a different conversation. I actually include the painting itself,” he noted.
His method works as a viewer of the structure behind the structure and, more, of the actual structure: the way we see, interpret and communicate with it through images and symbols. At the same time, the fish carries these questions with technical expertise, testing the Interplay of hand and machine, analog and digital, as a practical way to paint a purpose-driven world.
This desire to question bodies and love the body, and many people have created to face this problem, is shown in the daughters who appear in his studio and sometimes appear in his paintings. “I wanted to compare the way I draw figures in general, like a mannequin,” he explained. “Putting them aside would allow me to examine the nature of the norm versus the exception:
He also works with 3D modeling software that allows him to enter standard digital calculations. He added: “I was curious about their origin. “If you look at those 3D figures, they are not very different from the daughters. That connection made me happy.”
In this sense, the practice of fish comes from an investigation that cannot be denied in the framework of not only absence but also the simulation of human beings in a completely digital way. His works inhabit the space where the image ceases to represent and begins to imitate, recalling Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum, a reality that no longer needs the real. “I have a passion for art history, but I want to think about how painting can evolve,” she said. “It’s true, I still want the work to be beautiful, but I think about the durability of the paint – what it means to keep it alive in the age of data.” The emotional and questionable layers are the visual material of the canvas, revealing a creative presence that can be fully realized in a person.
“I wanted to find a way to create texture without painting it,” she said. “That reflected everything I was thinking about: the machine, the process.” His paintings blend well with the body. The way he uses color and height make them vibrate with tension, despite their aesthetic beauty. Discrimination itself is something that combines time, work and emotions, stretching and folding the layers of pigment color in what Henri Bergson described as time, the continuity of cognitive understanding and memory.
In his ongoing and general meeting of technology – offering control as he confirms the mass of paitherly-fish increases the challenge of Duchampian and Wareholi of Duchampian and the rejection of the hand of the artist. “Warhol’s disruption wasn’t just an idea – it wasn’t the process itself, about doing the act of painting with a machine,” he points out.
Here, the work of the fish becomes a critical attempt in that painting and illustration of pictures and images that are at the beginning of the original concept, an attempt to clarify the purity of the new concept of the digital space between the digital and the real. In this case, he touches on what Gilbert Simondon calls the technology of photography, where vision, data and matter merge into new hybrid beings. His works are not only Posethuman, full of data, they start it. Through their use of codes and the charge of the heart, they invite a redefinition of self-understanding that acknowledges, as Byung-chul han warns, the exhaustion of experience in the digital age but reconciles it with digital vision.
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