Since the rise of computing in the 1970’s and even more so since the “discovery” of “big data” in the 2010’s, artists have been grappling with the nature of being human in an age of surveillance, data collection, and quantification. Yaxuan Liao engages with this increasingly popular theme through their works Self as Data, 2025, and Frequency Fields, 2025, exploring the quantification of human experience, and the making-visible of invisible data.


Artwork still, Self as data, 2025, Yaxuan Liao 1:45

Human experience has always been the principal topic of art, and Liao has updated the genre for the modern age, with modern techniques, and contemporary experiences. However, you cannot engage with data as a medium without addressing the nature of humanness in an increasingly quantified world. Art within the topic of human data typically engages directly with the sinister nature of the increasingly data-driven nature of the modern age. As humanity seeks to understand and document everything which lurks in the sphere of uncertainty, can we truly reduce human experience to binary data?


Artwork still, Self as data, 2025, Yaxuan Liao 2:20

Previous exhibitions such as “Vertiginous Data” 2019, and “Data in the 21st Century” 2016, as well as data focussed artists like Trevor Paglen, and Tiziana Alocci, present artistic explorations on the topics of data, and what it means to be human in our increasingly quantified and data driven world, utilising data to create meaningful artistic investigations into our modern world.

In her article Data Humanism, the Revolution will be Visualised Giorgina Lupi expressed succinctly the power of visual design in our understanding of data. She states: ‘Visual design  -  with its power to instantly reach out to places in our subconscious without the mediation of language, and with its inherent ability to convey large amounts of structured and unstructured information across cultures  -  is going to be even more central to this silent but inevitable revolution’.


Artwork still, Self as data, 2025, Yaxuan Liao 3:08

Self as Data shows a representation of three types of “data”; sleep data, sentiment data, and respiratory data. Two of these categories - sleep and respiration - can reasonably be translated into datasets. However, sentiment is arguably unquantifiable, and yet Liao finds a way to visually represent the most human of experiences, emotion. The visual presence of this sentiment data is violent and chaotic, spiraling and swirling with the energy of extreme anger or elation. It is difficult not to recognise the similarities between this visual depiction, and the experience of feeling these emotions, translating an indescribable feeling into a visual language universally understood.

Liao uses data as a medium and presents a beautiful visualisation of humanness, without reducing human experience to a single, unchanging certainty. The ever shifting forms in Self as Data emphasize the attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, allowing us to recognise humanness in a depiction seemingly devoid of humanity.


Artwork still, Frequency Fields, 2025, Yaxuan Liao 2:52

The artwork destabilises traditional distinctions between measurable biological processes and subjective emotional states. This destabilisation leads to the questions; does this artwork represent the lack of humanness, does the quantification of human experience remove humanity itself, making the origin of the data obsolete, or is this in fact the purest form of human experience, expressed in a universally understandable way.

Within this pure reduction of human experience, Liao retains an essentially human element - fluctuation. The continuously changing visualisations avoid the ever present trap in data art - over simplification - and show human experience as a constantly changing, personal experience, rather than a single over simplified representation which reduces human complexity beyond recognition.


Artwork still, Frequency Fields, 2025, Yaxuan Liao, 3:00

Frequency Fields addresses another poignant facet: invisible data. In this work, Liao strives to bring visual form to that which is intangible - energetic currents embedded in data - turning invisible digital fluctuations into a vivid sensory landscape. Particle flows pulse with rhythm, spatial textures expand and contract, and luminous fields drift like atmospheric or tidal movements. The data takes on forms not unlike star clusters, X-Y graphs, and black holes, mirroring the abstract and unreachable qualities of the invisible systems they visualise.

Lupi’s concept of the transcendent quality of art as a language to express the inexpressible, is strongly present within Liao’s work. Rather than reducing humanity to quantifiable information, Liao’s work demonstrates how data is becoming a new artistic language through which emotion, human experience, and invisible systems are made perceptible. In doing so, Liao resists the dehumanising tendencies of quantification and instead reasserts the instability, complexity, and universality of human experience.