At the Chinese Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale, there is a robot that practices calligraphy. It does so with the grace of a mechanical arm trained to imitate Wang Dongling, the master of Chaos Script. Curator Yu Xuhong, president of the China Academy of Art, has placed it beside a monumental 16-metre-wide work, Free and Easy Wandering, where black ink spreads across paper like a living organism. The robot and the master. Metal and ink. Automation and soul.
But there is something the robot does not do. It does not introduce itself. It does not explain how it works, nor does it invite the viewer to question the nature of its “creativity.” It simply writes. And in its operational silence lies the entire difference between the Western approach to AI in art, which tends to exhibit technology as protagonist, and the Chinese approach, which dissolves it within a millennia-old narrative until it becomes invisible.
This is perhaps the true unicum of the Chinese Pavilion: the way in which technology is narrated.
The aesthetic trap of “tian ren he yi”
The title of the exhibition, Dream Stream, derives from the Dream Pool Essays (Mengxi Bitan) by Shen Kuo, an encyclopaedist of the 11th-century Song dynasty. British historian and biochemist Joseph Needham described Shen Kuo as “a milestone in the history of Chinese science” for his observations across disciplines ranging from optics and astronomy to geology and cartography. Curator Yu Xuhong has built the entire pavilion around the concept of “investigating underlying principles through the observation of phenomena” and the idea of “unity between heaven and man” (tian ren he yi).
Tian ren he yi is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in Chinese thought. But in its contemporary application, especially when paired with artificial intelligence, it risks becoming something more ambiguous. If man and nature (and, by extension, the machine) form a harmonious whole, then the distinction between creator and created, between subject and object, between control and autonomy, dissolves. And with it dissolves the very possibility of asking uncomfortable questions.
The calligraphy robot is not an autonomous entity that creates. It is a tool that extends the master’s hand. The installation Liangzhu Highlight, which projects symbols from the Liangzhu civilization interwoven with photoelectron data gathered by an orbiting satellite, is not a dialogue between past and future. It is an unbroken continuity, in which the ancient and the technological merge into a single, undifferentiated timeline.
This is the aesthetic trap: the beauty of harmony conceals the absence of tension. And where there is no tension, there is no critique.
AI as wenhua (culture), not jishu (technology)
To understand the Chinese Pavilion, one must understand a single word: wenhua. In Chinese, “culture” is not an autonomous field of symbolic production. It is the connective tissue of society, the vehicle through which the State transmits values, constructs collective identities, and legitimises its own power. Culture, in China, has always been political. And technology, once absorbed into culture, becomes political in turn.
The Chinese Pavilion does not present AI as jishu (technology). It presents it as wenhua (culture). And this is a strategic choice of geopolitical consequence. While the West, Europe in particular, with its AI Act, debates the balance between innovation and the protection of rights, between free markets and regulation, China is constructing an alternative narrative: AI as the expression of a millennia-old civilisation that has always known how to harmonise man and nature, tradition and progress.
And the Chinese Pavilion is the most sophisticated manifesto of this vision ever produced.
The Chinese dream of the cultural algorithm
In 2017, China’s State Council published the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, setting the goal of becoming the global leader in AI by 2030. It was not an industrial plan. It was a national power strategy. Since then, China has built a regulatory ecosystem that subordinates every technological development to national security and socialist core values.
In this context, the Pavilion takes on a dimension that extends well beyond art. It is a demonstration of narrative power. Look: we are capable of producing the most advanced AI (the calligraphy robot, the video game Black Myth: Wukong, the satellites collecting cosmic data) and, at the same time, of embedding it within a cultural framework that makes it harmonious, non-threatening, civilised. We are not Silicon Valley, plundering data and threatening jobs. We are not Europe, paralysed by regulation. We are China, where AI is simply the latest expression of a wisdom that has endured for millennia.
This is an exercise in geopolitical re-branding of extraordinary effectiveness. And it works because it rests on an impeccable aesthetic architecture.
The comparison with the West: two models of narration
To grasp the uniqueness of this operation, an implicit comparison with the Western approach is instructive. In European and American contemporary art exhibitions, AI is often presented as a problem. Its nature is interrogated: is it truly creative? Who holds the rights to AI-generated works? What is the environmental cost of large language models? What biases fuel the algorithms? Western art engaging with AI tends to be critical, self-referential, almost anxiety-inducing.
The Chinese Pavilion poses none of these questions. And this is not a design flaw. It is a programmatic choice. Critique, understood as an interrogation of the contradictions of the present, is incompatible with the model of wenhua that China is building. Contemporary Chinese culture, especially when exported through international platforms such as the Venice Biennale, must be harmonious, positive, constructive. It must present a country that has resolved the contradictions between tradition and modernity, between state control and innovation, between collectivism and individual creativity.
The calligraphy robot is the perfect embodiment of this model. It is not an autonomous artist challenging the master. It is a mechanical disciple perpetuating tradition. There is no conflict. There is only continuity.
The video game as cultural diplomacy
Another revealing element of the Chinese Pavilion is the presence of Black Myth: Wukong, the Game Science title that won Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2024 and Ultimate Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards 2024. In an international art pavilion, a commercial video game might seem out of place, but once the underlying logic is understood, it is not.
Black Myth: Wukong is not merely an entertainment product. It is a vehicle for national narrative. The protagonist is Sun Wukong, the legendary monkey from Journey to the West, one of the pillars of Chinese literature. The game exports Chinese mythology to a global audience of millions of players, many of whom know nothing of Chinese culture. It is soft power in interactive form, and it is significant that it is displayed in a “high art” context such as the Biennale: the message is that Chinese popular culture has reached a level of sophistication deserving of recognition by international art institutions.
But there is a further layer. Black Myth: Wukong was developed using advanced AI rendering technologies, motion capture, and generative artificial intelligence for asset creation. Exhibiting it in the Pavilion means saying: look how skilled we are at deploying AI not only for the optimisation of production and surveillance systems, but for culture. For telling stories. For building worlds.
A question worth asking
Yet, walking among the works of Dream Stream, a question hovers unspoken. If Chinese AI is so harmoniously integrated into tradition, so respectful of culture, so human, why does the Chinese government require such a massive regulatory apparatus to control it?
The Interim Measures for Generative AI Services (2023) require that AI-generated content reflect socialist core values, prohibit the generation of content that threatens national security or disrupts the economic and social order, and mandate a pre-launch security assessment for every generative AI model. The Measures for Labelling AI-Generated Content (2025) impose visible labels on all AI-produced content, with penalties of up to 100,000 yuan for violations.
These are the regulations of a country that knows perfectly well how potentially subversive AI can be, and that, simultaneously, presents it to the world as a tranquil river flowing gently through history.
And us?
The West, Europe in particular, is spending enormous resources on regulating AI, protecting individual rights, and ensuring algorithmic transparency. The EU AI Act, which entered into force in 2024, is the world’s first comprehensive regulatory framework, with penalties of up to 7% of global turnover for violations. It is an act of democratic responsibility. But it is also an act of paralysis. Europe regulates so intensively that it risks stifling innovation, ceding ground to actors who regulate selectively (for internal control) and innovate aggressively (for global competition).
The Chinese Pavilion presents an alternative model: not regulating innovation, but narrating it. Not controlling technology, but absorbing it into culture.
And now it is learning to explain this model to the world.
Art as a battlefield
The Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is a symbolic battlefield on which one of the most consequential contests of the 21st century is being played out: who will define the meaning of artificial intelligence for humanity? Who will decide whether AI is a tool of emancipation or control, of creativity or conformity, of dialogue or monologue?
China has understood that the answer to these questions will not be found, or at least not solely, among researchers and magistrates. It will be found in culture, in the stories we tell.
Dream Stream is a perfect title. Because a dream, by definition, is something that happens while we sleep, and this exhibition invites us to sleep.
To let ourselves be carried by the current of a narrative so harmonious and tranquil that we forget to ask who opened the dam.
