Sheung Yiu (HK / FI)

The exhibition (Inter) Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face, explores how societies across Eastern and Western cultures interpret faces to predict character and future. In East Asia, face-reading is a mystical practice believed to reveal one’s destiny, though largely folk tradition, it still attracts believers. Conversely, the West’s physiognomy, once considered pseudo-science, has been revived through modern facial recognition, machine learning, and statistical methods, often reflecting societal biases. The artist Sheung Yiu blends these practices by processing their own face through techniques like face reading, recognition, phenotyping, and synthetic data creation. This fusion visualizes the similarities between ancient folk beliefs and scientific algorithms, highlighting the blurred boundary between them. 

Sheung Yiu (born 1991, Hong Kong) is an image-centered artist and researcher, based in Helsinki. In his research-based practice, Yiu collaborates with multi-disciplinary experts to explore imaging practices emerging at the intersection of photography and large-scale computation. He is a doctoral researcher in photography at Aalto University. He is selected as a FOAM Talent 2024 and a member of FUTURES. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Hasselblad Foundation in Sweden, Taikwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, and the Circulation(s) Festival in France.