Over sixty-two per cent of the world’s population use social media, with the average user spending nearly 2.5 hours online per day. The big question: what impact is this having on us, as human beings? Peiyan Xu is a London-based visual artist responding to these ideas. His interactive work investigates the relationship between information systems and human perception, tapping into how cognition is being affected in the age of digital media. Xu’s practice spans 3D design, moving image, installation and visual communication.
A key entry in Xu’s oeuvre is Smog (2025), which received this year’s Red Dot Design Award for Brand & Communication Design and was recently exhibited at Photofusion Gallery, London. At its foundation, the project examines air pollution and its effects on health and wellbeing. Through extensive fieldwork, Xu gathered data on “haze” – an atmospheric condition caused by accumulated dust, smoke and industrial emissions that obscures visibility and degrades air quality. This phenomenon fluctuates according to wind speed, altitude, traffic density and time of day, reaching its peak during periods of congestion. Crucially, Smog makes scientific data – which is often complex and hard to parse – accessible to audiences.
Whilst Smog is a powerful tool for education, Xu is keen to point out that the project is about more than environmental observation. It also operates as a compelling metaphor for contemporary life in the digital age – a meditation on how perception is clouded by excess information and mediated vision. It asks, pointedly, what it means to “see” at a time when news and images are distorted, yet endlessly scrollable. At Photofusion Gallery, this concept was translated into an immersive spatial installation, where diffused light, semi-transparent materials and layered projections unsettled the viewer’s trust in sight itself.
Perception is a key throughline in Xu’s practice, and the game Primordial Realm (2025) is a prime example. The interactive virtual world offers a further exploration of digitisation and its disorienting impact on human experience. It was presented as part of this year’s London Design Festival, where it invited participants to navigate a sequence of atmospheric spaces, each reflecting a different stage of the information age. The first level, Mirror Space, confronts viewers with spiralling screens suspended in a deep purple void, encouraging them to step into a new digital world. This gives way to the next arena: a calm and ordered landscape, populated by evolving human forms who exchange accurate information. But it’s a fleeting vision of harmony. The experience later culminates in Chaos – an overwhelming field of red, symbolising today’s overflow of information and misinformation. Here, level design meets cultural critique.
Together, these works reveal Xu’s commitment to questioning how technology shapes the way we see the world. Just as how Smog is more than a research project, Primordial Realm is more than a game. It provides commentary on the problems of media saturation and unchecked technological advancement, considering how AI changes human cognition and ideology, whilst inspiring audiences to consider possible solutions. Xu’s work belongs within a generation of artists redefining how visual systems mediate experience, truth and memory. Felicity Hammond’s four-part touring project Variations, for example, traces the origins and impact of generative artificial intelligence – from mined materials, to what happens when the data produced by AI is fed back into its own system. Hammond’s answer: “it gives us an image that starts to fall apart.” Xu’s work is an equally important contribution to post humanistic artistic discourse, exploring how advancements in AI – and time online – are are blurring the boundaries between human and machine.
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Words: Eleanor Sutherland
Image Credits:
1. Courtesy Peiyan Xu, from Primordial Realm (2025).
2. Courtesy Peiyan Xu, from Smog (2025).
3. Courtesy Peiyan Xu, from Primordial Realm (2025).
4. Courtesy Peiyan Xu, from Smog (2025).
5. Courtesy Peiyan Xu, from Primordial Realm (2025).
