Biography
Daishi Luo is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based between Shanghai and Paris. For more than a decade, she has developed her practice through self-directed research, experimentation, fieldwork and encounters with different systems of knowledge. Her work investigates how phenomena emerge, how relationships generate new forms, and how processes that exceed direct perception can become observable.
Rather than working within a fixed medium, Luo develops each project according to its question and mode of inquiry. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, moving image, publication, experimental material systems and spatial environments. Across these forms, she creates conditions in which materials, bodies, technologies, environments and time can enter into relation.
A central methodology in her practice is Out of Control within Control: establishing conditions and boundaries while allowing material behaviour, environment, time and human intervention to remain active. What emerges is treated not simply as an outcome, but as a trace—something to observe, interpret and use to generate the next question.
Her research has expanded from material transformation toward broader questions of emergence, systems, distributed knowledge and perception, increasingly entering craft, scientific and technological environments as sites of artistic inquiry. She is currently an Artist Researcher Fellow at Manufactures nationales, France (2026–2028).
Why art?
Different fields make different forms of knowledge possible.
Scientific research develops evidence, models and methods of observation. Craft carries embodied and situated knowledge. Technology expands what can be measured, made and connected.
Art offers another kind of space—one in which these different ways of knowing can encounter one another through material, experience and imagination without needing to collapse into a single answer.
For me, artistic research is not a substitute for science, nor an illustration of it. It is a way of creating conditions in which different forms of knowledge can interact, become perceptible and generate new questions.
Background
Luo’s practice is shaped by a background in industrial design, material research and craft-based making.
Her early training established a way of working through prototypes, material tests and close observation of how things are made. Over time, this approach shifted from designing objects toward designing conditions—first through material experimentation, and later through field research, systems, embodied knowledge and scientific inquiry.
The studio, field site, workshop, museum and laboratory therefore function not as separate domains, but as different environments through which artistic questions can be developed.