Celebrating Innovation Across Technological Mediums: Award Winners from Beyond Interface and Prompt

This spring, the WAH Center proudly presents Beyond Interface and Prompt, a group exhibition that explores how technology is reshaping the language and materiality of contemporary art. From AI-involved imagery to interactive installations, from 3D printing sculptures to experimental sound pieces, the show brings together a diverse group of artists experimenting across mediums, formats, and disciplines.

As the WAH Center’s inaugural exhibition dedicated to technology-based art, Beyond Interface and Prompt also opens a dialogue across generations. Many of our salon members and long-time exhibiting artists come from a strong foundation in traditional practices—painting, sculpture, and printmaking. One of our hopes for this exhibition was to encourage more artists, regardless of background, to explore unfamiliar tools and methodologies—to push their practices into new territory and to see technology not as an endpoint, but as a bridge between past and future.

Our jury and curatorial team, Yuko Nii, Tairan Hao, and Yitong (Cassidy) Chen, was struck by the breadth of experimentation on display of varied creative process, not only in terms of media, but in the ways these artists are thinking critically about the role of how technology and art in a rapidly shifting world.

To recognize the outstanding contributions to the exhibition and acknowledge the innovation, the following awards were selected.

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Excellence in Merging Art & Tech

Award Winner: Taezoo Park

Park’s works reimagines obsolescence as opportunity. In his three exhibited works, he resurrects analog CRT televisions, and E-waste—discarded remnants of a bygone technological era—and reanimates them using Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other components. Rather than presenting nostalgia, Park’s works explore the deeper questions of digital memory, software/hardware entropy, and the sustainability of technological mediums. He creates a powerful contrast between material decay and algorithmic digital life, quietly communicating with the viewer through imagery signifiers and coded text. Grounded in both conceptual rigor and a clear material intelligence, Park’s practice not only honors the history of new media but challenges us to see discarded technologies not as detrius, but as dormant agents of meaning.

Creative Innovation

Winner: David Rios

David Rios’ “Zithere” resists categorization, it is both instrument and interface, sculpture and sonic machine, one that merges traditional acoustic form with custom-built electronics. The 12-string electro-acoustic sculpture uses modified “E-Bow” circuits to sustain and manipulate each string, allowing for both intuitive play and programmed experimentation. Rios opens a channel between analog acoustics and digital logic. What’s compelling isn’t just the hybrid form, but the way his work expands the language of performance: it’s tactile yet algorithmic, structured yet unpredictable. The result is not just for sound but for dialogue—between body and machine, performer and environment, experimentation and expression. In a show that asks how technology might shape meaning, Rios offers a response that is both precise and poetic.

Emerging Talent

Winners: DJ Kim, Yilin Ye, Haoren Zhong (Artist Group)

As emerging artists, DJ Kim, Yilin Ye, and Haoren Zhong approach technology not as a solved system, but as a space of live experimentation. Their work Mirror Me introduces a fresh visual language through an interactive canvas installed directly onto the wall—one that responds to the viewer’s presence. This evolving interface creates a sense of intimacy and dislocation at once, asking participants to engage with their own mediated image in real time. Rather than relying on spectacle, the group prioritizes subtlety and relationality, crafting a piece that speaks in flickers, loops, and momentary ruptures. Their collaboration is grounded in process and responsiveness, offering a promising glimpse into how emerging voices might reshape the boundaries of interactive art and physical space.

Honorable Mentions

1. Marcella Hackbardt
   
   

   

   
   Marcella Hackbardt’s Memories/Unraveling quietly dismantles and reconstructs memory, materiality, and fragility through a rich visual and conceptual language. Combining AI-generated lace-like brain forms with photographic fragments of broken figurines, the work sits between domestic tradition and scientific abstraction. Her use of photographic layering and symbolic deconstruction invites reflection on time, trauma, and the soft violence embedded in remembering.
   
   
2. Ziggy Yang
   
   
   
   Ziggy Yang’s Blossom is a quiet, meditative encounter with impermanence. Drawing from Eastern philosophy, the work uses responsive digital animation to translate the blooming of a hibiscus into a poetic gesture of presence and ephemerality. The piece doesn’t demand attention—it waits for it—gently rewarding the viewer’s stillness with visual bloom. Through subtle interaction, Yang opens a contemplative space that reflects on time, fragility, and the delicate rhythm of being.
   
   
3. Val Dyshlov
   
   
   
   Val Dyshlov’s graphite drawings form a striking triptych that sits at the intersection of AI-driven experimentation and hand-drawn expression. Using generative AI outputs as a visual prompt, he reinvents his own past works with layered symbolism and surrealist language. The resulting images—dense with enigmatic faces, dreamlike architecture, and mystical references—feel like windows into an internal mythology. His process embraces transformation and reinterpretation, extending the life of his previous paintings while suggesting that memory and creativity, like technology, are always in flux.
   
   
4. Ziyuan Lin
   
   

   

   Ziyuan Lin’s Sedimentation captures the ephemeral nature of memory through a precise choreography of magnetic tape, water, and glass. With a background in computer science, Lin translates the intangible processes of digital memory—its decay, fragmentation, and reformation—into physical terms. The suspended tape fragments drift and settle, echoing how recollections resurface or fade with time. Quiet and reflective, the installation invites viewers to witness memory as both material and metaphor, shaped not only by what is preserved but by what is lost.
   
   
5. Larry Scaturro
   
   
   
   Larry Scatturo’s sculptures bridge traditional craftsmanship and contemporary fabrication, offering a dialogue between hand-carved intimacy and digital reproduction. Slave and Reclaiming Nude on Blue exemplify how scanned and 3D-printed versions of original wooden works can be transformed into entirely new aesthetic experiences. Far from simply replicating form, Scatturo’s process recontextualizes classical figures through material and scale shifts, encouraging viewers to reconsider permanence, authorship, and the evolving role of the sculptor in the digital age.
   
   
6. Kumi Hirose
   
   
   
   Kumi Hirose’s work stands at the intersection of symbolism, spirituality, and contemporary consciousness. As a long-time WAH Salon member, Hirose brings her signature painterly language into dialogue with today’s rapidly shifting technological advancement landscape. Though working in traditional media, her piece reflects a layered conceptual engagement—where the human psyche, technological circuitry, and mythic motifs merge into a surreal visual field. Her willingness to explore new directions while staying rooted in her own practice is emblematic of the kind of experimentation the exhibition seeks to inspire across mediums.

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These awards are a celebration of artistic processes that challenge boundaries—between the digital and the physical, the conceptual and the tactile, the personal and the political. All the works exemplifies a commitment to rethinking the role of technology in art—not as a tool of replication, but as a site of possibility.

Each piece in Beyond Interface and Prompt contributes to a shared conversation about what it means to make art in a world increasingly mediated by screens, systems, and machines. Some works respond with subtle gestures; others take bold leaps into the unknown. What connects them all is a commitment to expanding the language of contemporary art—and a willingness to take risks that matter.

While the awards highlight a small number of particularly resonant contributions, the jury and curatorial team were deeply moved by the range and thoughtfulness of all participating artists. The selection process was not one of exclusion, but of deep engagement and difficult decisions. Every artist in the exhibition has brought something meaningful to the table, and it is this collective effort that gives the show its richness and complexity.

We extend our heartfelt congratulations and gratitude to everyone who shared their work, time, and vision with us. Your contributions have made this show not only possible, but vital. We hope this is just the beginning of a longer dialogue—and that Beyond Interface and Prompt continues to spark new ideas and connections long after its closing.

For more information, press inquiries, or access to artist bios and images, please contact: wahtechart@gmail.com