Sougwen Chung, whose name is also written 愫君, is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher who works alongside custom-built robotsto explore the relationship between hand-drawn and machine-made marks.Since 2015 they have developed the Drawing Operations series,,successive generations of robotic drawing systems called D.O.U.G. that Chung trains on their own drawing gestures and, in later generations, on biometric data.Born in Canada, Chung is based in London.
Early generations of D.O.U.G. relied on robotic mimicry of Chung's drawing gestures, and later ones added neural networks trained on two decades of archived mark-making before EEG-driven biofeedback was introduced.By 2022 Chung had built five generations of D.O.U.G., including a fourth generation linked to the artist's brain activity through an electroencephalogram and shown during Frieze London.MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_2) entered the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the first AI model acquired by a major cultural institution.,Chung has described the robotic arm in the series as a “mechanical double”, and traces its lineage to Harold Cohen's AARON and to the Gutai artist Akira Kanayama.In 2023 Chung was named to TIME's TIME100 AI list and received its Global Impact Award. In 2019 Chung was named Woman of the Year in Monaco for achievement in the Arts and Sciences.,Chung is the founder of SCILICET, an experimental studio based in London.,
In 2022 Chung presented Assembly Lines at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition “In Search of the Present”, a kinetic installation activated by a live performance in which D.O.U.G._5 responded to the artist's EEG-measured meditation states across three simultaneous paintings.,,In 2026 Chung's solo exhibition “RECURSIONS 遞迴” at Art Basel Hong Kong's Zero 10 combined a ten-meter ink scroll and paintings made with two chemically incompatible inks, one a water-based calligraphic ink and the other a custom metallic ink containing silver microparticles and silk fibroin. For the exhibition, Chung trained transformer models on a decade of D.O.U.G. outputs and thirty years of their own drawings, then modulated the resulting gestures in real time using a brainwave sensor. Chung has described this practice through the framework of Operational Art, built on protocols, thresholds and sequences developed across more than a decade of Drawing Operations.Beginning in 2025, Chung expanded the practice to include research into biosynthetic materials, including silk circuitry drawn from silkworms raised in the studio.,
