COPPEPCOLORS
From making colour to cultivating creation
2016 - Ongoing
Supported by the National Arts Fund of China and the Shenzhen Creative Foundation
For centuries, colour has been applied onto materials as a finished surface. Nature works differently. It cultivates colour through continuous interactions between minerals, living systems, chemistry, environment, and time.
Since 2016, Copper Colors has used copper as a living experimental platform to investigate whether artistic creation can learn from this logic. Rather than treating copper as the subject of research, the program explores how new modes of creation might emerge when matters, scientific inquiry, craftsmanship, and ecological processes continuously learn from one another.
527 Cultivated colours/ Format
A living research platform for cultivating new modes of creation
Copper Colors is a long-term artistic research program initiated in 2016. Rather than studying copper itself, it uses copper as a living experimental platform where materials, scientific inquiry, craftsmanship, and ecological processes continuously interact.
Over nearly a decade, this research has evolved into the Copper Color Gene Bank—an open research infrastructure containing 527 cultivated colours, experimental methods, material archives, field research, and artworks.
Unlike a conventional colour library, Copper Colors is organised around cultivation processes rather than finished outcomes.
Every experiment expands the platform.
Every artwork becomes part of its evolution.
172 Craft Traditions
429 Knowledge Holders
Learning from the field
Before entering the studio, the research entered the field.
Over nearly a decade, field research across more than 172 locations throughout China explored how different communities create through long-term collaboration with their local environments. Workshops, farms, forests, mountains, mines, historical sites, and villages became part of an extended research landscape.
The objective was never to learn craft form traditional craftsmanship. It was to understand how different ways of creating emerge through continuous cooperation between humankind and nature.
Across different regions, one observation appeared repeatedly. People create with the materials their environments provide—soil, water, fire, plants, minerals, bamboo, silk, metals, paper, and countless other local resources. These materials are never used in isolation. They are understood through generations of observation, adaptation, and practice, gradually forming distinct regional cultures of making.
Craftsmanship revealed another important insight. Neither a single material nor a single individual creates an object. Every ceramic vessel, woven textile, lacquerware, metal surface, or bamboo structure is the visible outcome of a much larger ecology—where natural resources, environmental conditions, specialised skills, and collective knowledge organise themselves through time.
Creation is not simply the transformation of materials. It is the continuous cultivation of relationships between humans, nature, materials, and knowledge.
Experimental Cultivation
The studio became a place where different ways of knowing could meet. Knowledge gathered through fieldwork entered into dialogue with chemistry, biology, electrochemistry, microscopy, traditional Chinese medicine, plant dyeing, mineral reactions, and environmental observation.
Copper gradually shifted from being a material to becoming a living ground for experimentation. Instead of applying colour onto its surface, colour was cultivated through time.
Custom-developed solutions composed of plant extracts, minerals, medicinal ingredients, seawater, and other naturally derived substances interact with copper under carefully designed conditions.
Thousands of experiments
Out of Control within Control
Surface preparation, solution chemistry, humidity, temperature, light, electricity, microorganisms, and duration all participate in the cultivation process. Thousands of experiments—including failures, unexpected reactions, and prolonged observation—gradually led to a methodology I call “Out of Control within Control”. A methodology based on creating controlled conditions while allowing materials, environments, and time to actively participate in the formation of new structures and meanings.
Creation therefore becomes neither complete control nor complete chance. It becomes a process of co-evolution between human intention and the self-organising capacities of matter.
527 Cultivated colours/ Format
10 Years
COPPERCOLORS
Every cultivated colour is simultaneously a record of previous discoveries and a starting point for future ones. Over years of continuous experimentation, individual recipes gradually accumulated into a living system rather than a collection of isolated results.
Today the Copper Color Gene Bank contains 527 cultivated colours, each documenting repeatable relationships between materials, environmental conditions, experimental methods, and time.
Unlike conventional colour systems, every colour within the Gene Bank can be reproduced, dismantled, modified, recombined, and expanded into new experiments. Every new experiment simultaneously transforms the entire system.
4 Famillies
COPPERCOLORS
The Gene Bank currently develops through four interconnected research families:
Source Colors investigate the intrinsic behaviours of copper.
Heritage Colors reinterpret traditional material knowledge discovered through field research.
Generated Colors cultivate entirely new colour systems through interdisciplinary experimentation.
Ecological Colors explore long-term collaboration between human intervention and environmental processes.
Rather than functioning as an archive of finished colours, the Gene Bank operates as a living ecology of material knowledge that continues to evolve through practice.
Research Outputs
Artworks crystallise a living system.
The artworks generated through Copper Colors are not illustrations of the research.
They are moments in which the research becomes visible. Each work isolates a particular question emerging from the cultivation process—whether exploring uncertainty, geological time, ecological collaboration, material agency, or the relationship between human intention and natural transformation.
The Gene Bank and the artworks therefore evolve together.
As artistic practice generates new questions, new experiments enter the research system. As the research system expands, it enables new artistic possibilities.
Creation no longer follows a linear path from idea to object.
It becomes an evolving ecosystem in which research, experimentation, and artistic practice continuously cultivate one another.
Next Question
From materials to living systems.
Copper Colors began with a simple question:
Can creation itself be cultivated rather than produced?
Over time, another question emerged.
If materials can reorganise into new possibilities through cultivation, what happens when technologies, living organisms, human bodies, and ecological systems begin to evolve together?
This question extends the research beyond the scale of materials toward the cultivation of hybrid forms of existence.
It becomes the foundation of the next research program.
→ Composite Being
