The Grand Tour · 2026 China Academy of Art (CAA) Graduation Season has come to a successful close. Graduates from 20 academic units responded to the times with art and explored the future through creativity, unfolding a youthful narrative of ideals, journeys, and growth across the city and campus, transforming Hangzhou into an open art venue that gathers intellectual power, creativity, and action.
The China Academy of Art is proud to launch the "Youth Insights" series, which continues to focus on topics such as avant-garde practice, humanities and technology, rural academies, A better China, rooted construction, people-centered, poetic cinema, visual sinology, Eastern design, and overseas insights. The series closely follows how young creators measure the world with their footsteps and respond to the times with their works. Between every departure and arrival, we jointly witness the grand explorations and boundless possibilities of a new generation of artists.
Faced with an ever-evolving technological landscape and shifting social realities, young creators are breaking through established boundaries with an open perspective, actively exploring across media, concepts, and methods. Bringing together interdisciplinary practices, technological experimentation, and conceptual innovation, they engage with the complex issues of today's world through a reexamination of artistic language and creative mechanisms. Through continuous experimentation and relentless growth, they demonstrate a new generation of artists' bold exploration of uncharted territories and their untapped creative potential.
Intimate Lover: A Reflexive Artificial Agent
Chen Pengfan
College/School:
School of Intermedia Art
Supervisors/Instructors:
Cai Yuxiao, Wu Ziyang, Cao Shu
Medium:
Automated AI Agents
System-level AI agents (such as OpenClaw) are gradually gaining persistent access to personal computers, operating within a framework of data, models, and permission systems provided by enterprise platforms.
This work runs an AI agent that continuously retrieves contradictions and misrepresentations from publicly available corporate information, translating them into signals that drive a virtual whip. The whip then issues new system instructions back to the agent—including file modifications, permission adjustments, and changes to the runtime environment. Each execution generates new conditions for the next iteration, keeping the system within a continuously operating feedback loop.
The whip module is a secondary development based on the open-source project badclaude (VibeWhip). The original project materializes human users' urging of AI coding assistants into a simple and direct control mechanism. This work retains the form of that mechanism while shifting its target and operational scale: control no longer takes place between human and agent, but rather between the agent, the operating system, and platform infrastructure.
The work treats the personal computer as a site co-occupied by multiple agents—where assistance and control, authorization and intrusion, tool and infrastructure become increasingly difficult to distinguish.
Supervisor's Message
You might think this is just a piece of technological playfulness—but it is not. This work is an artificial intelligence lifeform that continuously runs and lashes itself. An AI agent is an artificial intelligence entity with autonomous decision-making capabilities, able to act in place of humans. Beginning with the Crayfish Incident of 2026, AI agents have truly entered the public sphere as the most profound revolution in today's artificial intelligence landscape—for the first time, everyone has genuinely felt the fundamental impact of AI agency on humanity. In response to and in reflection upon the major issues raised by agents, a senior undergraduate student has constructed an agentic self-reflexive system. This AI agent persistently takes control of the computer, continuously scraping and interpreting corporate documents from tech giants regarding artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, this very action drives a pink whip to strike the computer, interfering with the agent's own reading process. Whether on technical or conceptual levels, I see in this work a young person with keen sensibility, along with the critical technological and cultural reflections he has undertaken.
— Cai Yuxiao
Chen Pengfan
Born in Taizhou, Zhejiang. He received his bachelor's degree from the Department of Open Media, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art.
His creative practice spans programmatic art, generative art, video games, and other forms, integrating a profound understanding of technological aesthetics with critical inquiry.
