In the book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), Mark Fisher deconstructs the idea of 'weird' not as something strange or profane but rather as something that feels that way because it comes from outside our normal way of understanding the world around us. More specifically, he argues that the weird and the eerie let us see “the inside from the perspective of the outside". Glasgow-based Chinese artist Audrey Ni Ruorong investigates the same theory but from a visual standpoint; her work feels as if it is constantly trying to grasp something that cannot be described with an ordinary sense of meaning, producing a sophisticated blend of New Weird fiction, digital technology, and traditional Chinese cosmology, structured through a unique set of conceptual and visual frameworks.

At the centre of Ruorong’s practice is the "Weird Methodology”, a concept rejecting the conventional linear narration in favour of reverse construction, fragmentation, and speculative reconstruction. Is It Series (2024–2025) presents this investigation, bringing together many of her working theories. The three-part moving image piece stands between different spectrums; taking inspiration from surrealism, there is a tension between the “uncanny and the sacred, the flesh and the floral”. The body is seen not as a fixed entity but as something excavated from space through manipulation, gesture, visual disorientation and architecture, investigating the new materialist thinking of the "disappearance of the creator as an anchoring subject". In Is It 1 (2024), a digital collage, the body is anchored to its original spatial position within an underground car park as the artist navigates the space by climbing, crawling and stretching across it, while manipulating the images afterwards. The finished black-and-white piece resembles Shu Lea Cheang’s aesthetics. Following a similar fascination with cyberpunk language, using technology as a manipulation tool fosters an atmosphere that is difficult to categorise. 

In the second act of this work, Is It 2 (2025), we are confronted with a change in scenery. Set in a hallway, it features a multitude of deliberate reconfiguring limbs and chaotic lighting, utilising astrological symbols as speculative markings. The visual composition of the work departs from the Freudian "uncanny", where the home becomes the site of strangeness: a juxtaposition between the familiar setting of the artist’s apartment and the use of her own body, but visually the dissection and reworking of the images give it an eerie and surreal atmosphere. Rather than relying solely on the surreal aesthetics of the "uncanny", the artist evolves this theory by focusing on the “ab-canny”, a term extracted from weird fiction. More precisely, the term doesn't rely on repressed and concrete images but rather on impersonal presences and abstraction, like mathematical formulas or "dim types of wind". 

The finale of this series, Is It Video (2025), is a moving image piece that combines real footage shot in her flat with AI-generated transitions between manual collages. Through these series, the viewer encounters a sense of instability, where images are partly unreadable and speculative, as images and audio do not merely illustrate a myth or technology or a specific space; they function as a method for producing unfinished and strange forms of knowledge, leaving space for the viewers to create their own narrative logic.

“So, this video was actually the first time I used AI directly in my artwork. Before that, AI was more of a concept in my work, but I hadn’t really used it in my practice. For this video, the way I produced it is:I collage each frame of the video myself, and then I let AI generate the connection between the two frames I created," the artist explains.

Ruorong, who is a doctoral researcher in fine art at Glasgow School of Art, carves a subtle conceptual line between order and chaos with a multidisciplinary practice that intentionally uses AI as a collaborator. Taken as a whole, image-making is treated as an encounter with the incomprehensible, mixing digital technology and Chinese cosmology (the textual markings in Is It 2 (2025) reference Zi Wei Dou Shu, a Chinese astrological system) to create narratives that do not rely on a simple and continuous story arc but rather on dispersion. A key agent in this process is AI, which becomes more of a collaborator than a neutral instrument, using the body as the anchor; translated stories are rewritten through cybernetic systems that make interpretation feel partial, precarious, and unresolved. When using AI, the artist generates and reworks it manually so authorship doesn't become concrete but rather a fluid and disruptive concept. Vesica (2024), a digital collage, is a perfect example of this merge of traditions. Made in a time of isolation, the work stages the impossibility of ever representing an original psychic state by translating automatic poems through AI. This gesture results in neither the artist's reflection nor the algorithm's. And this is the point. The poems written by the artist are transformed into images that are then intensely manipulated, proposing this cycle of creation where the artist and AI can become both creators and observers. Rather than becoming a literal record of inner experience, the images are the record of the failure of interpretation itself, being a poetic delineation of how inner states and human emotions cannot be completely understood. As part of the Ergodic project, it doesn't aim to offer a literal truth; AI is a site of epistemic instability; it is not able to reveal the poem's hidden meaning. It creates a second layer of ambiguity, exposing how meaning is constructed and mediated. More specifically, it shows that the truth is an assembled concept; it is created through unstable systems of translation.

“I’m not a very political person, and I don’t want my work to be interpreted in a directly political, social, or humanistic way on purpose. Instead, I think my work conveys a certain “feeling”: a kind of emotion or tension that I can feel, and maybe other people can also feel it. So for me, the message is this inner tension between control and the uncontrollable.” the artist stated in our interview.

Ruorong is not simply making strange moving images; she allows form to remain haunted by chaos, producing a visual language in which myth, code, and body never settle into a single meaning. In other words, she is creating a condition of knowing in which the uncontrollable and the inner tension between chaos and order become not a weakness, but the work's main critical power. Her visual language makes space for the philosophy of the unresolved, where AI and mythology become intrinsically connected within a single epistemic system. 

Know more about the artist's work here. 

Cover image:

Video still of It is Video (2025). Courtesy of the artist.