IDEAS Performance: Peeling Cycle - Anqi Liu, Han Zhang and Mingyong Cheng

Peeling Cycle is a live audiovisual performance with DIY laser device, multimodal AI generation, and embodied interactive performance that investigates how artificial intelligence participates in the production of gendered visibility. The work understands AI as part of a surrogate human order shaped by racialized and gendered structures embedded in social data. Language-based AI inherits social bias as well as structured relations: associations, proximities, and symbolic hierarchies, through which social reality is organized and interpreted. From this position, the project asks whether machine perception can be reoriented through the lived experiences of Asian female immigrant artists, shifting AI from abstract recognition toward situated interpretation.

Technically, the work integrates endoscopic camera input, breath classification through spectral analysis, DIY laser projection, live object detection, word-vector association, language-model interpretation, customized voice synthesis, and real-time image and audio generation through TouchDesigner and Ableton Live. These processes are incorporated as representational procedures: sensing, scanning, associating, narrating, and re-rendering become ways of staging how bodies are made visible, classified, translated, and misrecognized through technological systems. By embedding AI outputs within live gesture, sound, material interaction, laser movement, and manual visual control, Peeling Cycle resists the model of AI as an autonomous generator and instead stages machine intelligence as a contested mirror of social reality.

A Happy Mennn trio:

AHM, A Happy Mennn Trio, is an interdisciplinary multimedia performance trio formed by Anqi Liu, Han Zhang, and Mingyong Cheng. AHM’s work explores the lived experiences of immigrant Asian women artists building artistic practices, careers, and everyday lives in the West through technology, sound, multimedia, and free improvisatory performance. Their practice moves fluidly across audiovisual ecologies, experimental performance, interactive systems, and embodied sonic environments, approaching performance as a site where identity, migration, memory, labor, and cultural translation continuously intersect and unfold.

Anqi Liu, music composer, interdisciplinary/multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker

Han Zhang, multimedia artist, computer musician, cross-media performer and engineer

Mingyong Cheng, new/digital media artist, interdisciplinary visual artist, creative technologist

Social: https://www.instagram.com/ahappymennn

Anqi Liu:

Praised by The Wire for music of “iridescent delicacy” and“superb,” Anqi Liu is a composer, interdisciplinary multimedia artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Boomkat described her solo album of improvisatory synthesizer performance as “detailed, narrative-driven sound that traipses across the physical and historical world to make connections we might not initially perceive.” The San Diego Union-Tribune praised her orchestral work for its distinctive musical color and compositional introspection. Her composition is included in The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp. Her portrait album Veiled Erosion (KAIROS) has been widely acclaimed, including a review in de Volkskrant calling the music “abstract soundscapes, at times frightening, at times heartbreakingly beautiful,” and features in The Wire, Sonograma, Reportersonline, musiquemachine, and El Compositor Habla, highlighting her fragile, intimate sonic universe and its expansive cultural reach. Writing on Veiled Erosion, critic Peter Margasak noted that Liu “had already veered from any sort of conventional pathway,” situating her work within a contemporary experimental lineage shaped by instability, improvisational tension, performer agency, and communal listening aesthetics. Working across acoustic composition, free improvisation, electronics, modular synthesizer, traditional Mongolian choor khuur, multimedia, interactive system design, and audiovisual ecologies, she works on an ecology that she called fraysonics, where attunement that dwells with fragility, silence, and the limits of documentation, so relation, memory, and endurance remain audible without being reduced into extractable form. Beginning in June 2026, Anqi will serves as Assistant Professor and Music Production Program Lead at RMCAD. She holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UC San Diego. 

Website:  https://www.anqiliu.com/

Social: https://www.instagram.com/anqiliumusic

Han Zhang:

Han Zhang is a multimedia artist, computer musician, performer and engineer based on earth. She actively works on creative projects that explore the new form of multimedia participatory performances with DIY installations that deliver immersive interactive experience and support her theatrical practice. She is interested in discussing the collective comprehension of technology, art, and substantive human lives. In the realm of music technology and engineering, she is interested in exploring the interpretability and controllability of timbre in sound and designing musical instruments that incorporate innovative research results. Han has presented her artworks in various academic communities including ICMC, ArteFacto, Siggraph, etc, as well as in AI-centered conferences such as NeurIPS and CVPR. She is invited as a guest artist in Every Woman Biennale(NYC) in 2026, and is currently a composer in residency at elektronmusikstudion(EMS) in Stockholm, Sweden. Han is currently pursuing her PhD in Computer Music at UC San Diego, and she has received her Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University, and her Bachelor of Engineering in Automation from Tsinghua University, China. She also visited Center for New Music and Audio Technologies(CNMAT) at UC Berkeley as a research scholar.

Website: https://zhanghanunwalled.com/

Social: https://www.instagram.com/hanzhangpqqo

Mingyong Cheng:

Mingyong Cheng is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and creative technologist from Beijing, now based in California. She works across generative AI, computational media, and immersive art, creating interactive installations, performances, and real-time audiovisual systems that combine sensing technologies, spatial media, and machine learning. Her practice treats AI as a creative collaborator shaping perception, narrative, and audience experience, often developed through collaborations with curators, choreographers, and composers. She has led commissioned projects for institutions including the San Diego Museum of Art and Jacob’s Pillow Doris Duke Theater, and her work has been presented internationally at venues such as ACM SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, ISEA, and the IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery. 

Website: https://www.mingyongcheng.com/

Social: https://www.instagram.com/mingyong_art/

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