Hello there,
Join us on September 23 for the FUTURES x Magnum Artist Spotlight featuring Sheung Yiu.
For this talk, Sheung Yiu will present his ongoing project (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How To Read a Face.
Across Eastern and Western cultures, societies have developed ways to predict a person’s character through facial features. In East Asian cultures, the esoteric practice of face-reading promises the power to see into one’s future through facial analysis. Though face reading remains largely a folk belief, many continue to seek the occult power of predictions from face readers. In the West, the forgotten pseudo-science of physiognomy, combined with statistics and machine learning, re-enters our modern lives as facial recognition algorithms, perpetuating societal biases and individual prejudices.
In this project, Sheung Yiu blends the visual language of the occult in face reading with the “scientific” aesthetic of facial recognition to blur the lines between these practices from the East and West. This visual study reveals the similarities between the two predictive regimes centered around the face: one remains folklore, while the other is extensively applied to almost every aspect of our daily lives. The project challenges the automation bias of facial recognition (or what he calls “Western face reading”) and unveils the deeper, often unexamined belief system underlying these practices.
© Sheung Yiu
Event details
Date: Tuesday, 23 September
Time: 6–7 PM (Amsterdam time)
Location: Online (Free – Registration Required)
Register here