We recently connected with Anna Borou Yu and have shared our conversation below.
Anna Borou, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
As a researcher and media artist, I am exploring how traditional art forms and ancient imagination could be reinterpreted through embodied technology. One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on is Embodied Ink, a media performance piece that reimagines Chinese calligraphy through interactive media. Manifesting as a two-dimensional artform, Chinese Calligraphy actually results from the process of three-dimensional stroke-body motion. It transcends mere representation, embodying a profound physical and philosophical practice. I am particularly interested in how we can reveal the invisible movement and philosophical concept underlying Chinese calligraphy.
To achieve this, I collaborated with dancers and used technologies like motion capture, biosensing, and generative AI models trained on historical calligraphy datasets. The dancer’s motion became the brushstroke, and their biodata modulated the stroke’s intensity, opacity, and fluidity in real time. Drawing inspiration from Chinese cosmological philosophy, where the body is imagined as wind, fire, water, smoke, and light, transcending physical existence, we created an immersive audiovisual space where ink flowed like abstract natural elements, animated not by code alone, but in composition with a living body. This piece was premiered at 2024 NEW INC DEMO CLOSING PERFORMANCE, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and it was also showcased at CVPR AI Art Gallery.
As a Chinese artist working to bridge art, culture and technology, Embodied Ink reconciles my cultural roots with my research and artistic language, and that’s what made it so meaningful to me.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m Anna Borou Yu — a new media artist, interdisciplinary researcher, and dancer. I am the Cofounder and Creative Director of MYStudio, an experimental media art studio based in Boston that integrates humanity, media art, performance and technology. At the heart of my work is a devotion to reimagining cultural memory and embodied experience through emerging media, from extended reality to artificial intelligence. I create not just artworks, but experiences for movement, reflection, and resonance.
My creative journey began with architecture, first at Tsinghua University, then at the Yale School of Architecture, where I was trained to think structurally, spatially, and critically. Besides, as a dancer trained in both ballroom and Chinese classical dance, I’ve long felt the body to be a language of its own, expressive, intuitive, and alive. Over time, I realized I needed to move beyond static forms and build a practice that could flow across disciplines and create dynamic experiences. Today, my work explores how technologies like AI, XR, motion capture, and real-time interaction can deepen our experience of performance, space, and heritage. I’ve created multimedia projects that blend live performance, digital embodiment, and immersive storytelling.
For example, “The Invisible Body” series uses motion capture to transform dancers’ movements into real-time digital forms, creating a multisensory theater that questions the relationship between body and space, physical and virtual, tangible and invisible. XingQi · Consciousness is a multimedia and site-specific dance film combining classical aesthetics and contemporary media techniques. Through the dialogue between body language, projection mapping and camera movement, the performance connects the material, space, media art and spirit, interpreting the imperial kiln aesthetics of the broken and eternal, and the spirit of tenacious, distant and romantic. My work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and festivals including the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica Art Gallery, Chengdu Biennale, Asia Digital Art Exhibition, Arte Laguna Prize, and Lumen Prize among others.
Beyond artistic creation, research and system design are also central to my practice. One example is DAMUS, a creative AI platform that bridges choreography and music composition. This system aims to establish a collaborative foundation, allowing for more productive creations between composers and choreographers. This project was published at IEEE AIART Workshop, and shared at the IRCAM Forum @ NYU. My broader research into AI, embodiment, and cross-modal translation has been published at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR, and other leading conferences.
Whether on stage, on screen, or in research labs, my work continues to explore how technology can help us create moments where the audience feels something unexpected, something that shifts their perception or reconnects them with a part of themselves or their culture.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I studied architecture during my undergraduate years at Tsinghua University and went on to pursue a Master of Architecture at Yale. At Yale, I found myself immersed in a truly interdisciplinary environment. The program’s openness allowed me to take courses not only within the School of Architecture, but also in the School of Drama, the School of Art, the Department of Music, and beyond. I explored fields like set design, directing, projection design, digital music composition, sculpture, art history, and visual storytelling.
It was during this time that I became deeply inspired by Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art.” I was fascinated by the idea that motion, music, drama, visual art, and architecture could be integrated into a unified, immersive experience. That cross-disciplinary and multimodality perspective became the heart of my creative pursuit.
Then, in early 2020, just before I graduated, the world shut down. The pandemic arrived like a tidal wave, closing theaters, museums, galleries, and job opportunities in the art field were scarce. There wasn’t even a graduation ceremony, just my quiet small Brooklyn apartment and an uncertain future. In that stillness, I realized that I would have to build my own path.
Together with my partner Jiajian, I co-founded an experimental media art studio, MYStudio. We began crafting virtual performances and immersive experiences that could transcend physical distance and reach a global audience. Our first VR project, World of Freedom, was showcased for the ACM SIGGRAPH Asia and Ars Electronica Art Gallery. Around the same time, our research paper, Translation Between Dance and Music, was published at SIGGRAPH Asia Posters. These early recognitions gave me the confidence to fully pivot from traditional architecture to a broader practice as a multimedia artist.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
At the heart of my creative journey is a deep desire to reimagine artistic expression and human experience through the lens of state of the art technology. I’m drawn to emerging tools like AI and XR not only for their novelty, but for their potential to touch something timeless: our consciousness, our cultural inheritance, and the way we feel in our bodies and in the world.
If we look at thousand years of art history, we see that technology has always extended the boundaries of art language. From oil and brush to camera and code, each era’s tools have reshaped how we express ourselves and how we connect with one another. Today, AI and XR are not only transforming how we create art and knowledge, they are also changing the very nature of human intelligence and experience.
To me, AI and XR mirror two dimensions of the human self. AI speaks to the mind, our cognition, logic, and creativity. XR speaks to the senses, our emotions, perception, and memory. They are both multimedia, multimodal, and deeply human in their implications. When combined, they open new ways to feel, to think, to remember, and to dream.
But technology, for me, is not the destination, it is the passage. With AI and XR, I want to create works that move people, moments where the audience feels something unexpected, something that shifts their perception or reconnects them with a part of themselves or their culture.
At the core of my practice is a question: What does it mean to be human in an age of intelligent machines and digital embodiment? Through my work, I try to carve out space for reflection, for remembrance, and for reimagining, grounded in cultural heritage, and looking toward the future.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mystudio.design/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/annaborouyu
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annaborouyu
