One of the places where people tend to notice each other is public transport. As we await our departure, sometimes a longer time goes by, and unwittingly we start observing the types of people which happen to be nearby. Looking at a face is an exciting communicative process, which now increasingly takes place through social media, as we automatically submit our faces to a digital suite of cloud services. No human being knows what role their photographic likeness will play under the direction of artificial intelligence in the near or more distant future. For now, our faces are merely collected in a gigantic depository of images for an unspecified need and are used for strictly rational purposes – identity and security checks, consumer behavior analysis, and other applications where facial search programs are useful. However, while waiting for a bus, trolleybus, or tram, we are among real people and can try to understand and not misunderstand each other by looking at the faces.

The intricacies of face-reading traditions are the subject of Sheung Yiu , a Finnish-based Hong Kong artist. In place of the familiar advertisements, Riga public transport shelters will display images from his study (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face, which the artist has been developing since 2023. It can be seen as a history of interpretation of faces across cultures and eras, which in the contemporary world – in this time of technology and artificial intelligence, when everyone has free access to digital facial recognition systems – has acquired a particular relevance. In his visual study, Sheung Yiu uses his own face, employing new technologies to subject it to a variety of processes testing past traditions developed by the societies of the East and West. Furthermore, the study touches on the fields of anthropology and linguistics, raising the awareness of the trusting users of machine seeing: just like during the preceding centuries, and even more rapidly, stereotypes and social prejudice are spreading through language.

In his project (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How To Read a Face, the artist compares the experiences of Eastern and Western culture in their desire to judge a person’s character and fate according to their facial features. In the cultures of East Asia, face-reading is an esoteric practice developed over centuries that is related to telling the future, which even today has not lost its occult appeal, despite awareness of the indemonstrability and irrationality of its conclusions. Meanwhile in the West, physiognomy, a quasi-science that blossomed in the 18th century, was more related to medicine, claiming it was possible to determine a person's temperament, character traits or medical diagnosis from facial features. It employs the language of science, and so it was appropriated by, among others, Nazi ideologues as a credible justification for racial stereotypes.

By taking a look at the past and dismantling the boundary between the Eastern and Western face-reading habits, Sheung Yiu’s work draws attention to the similarities between contemporary facial recognition algorithms and the principles of physiognomy, which imperceptibly encode social prejudice into machine seeing and makes it eternal. He calls for a critical perspective on digital as well as analog technologies, algorithmic and esoteric practices that generate prejudice, concluding: “A face is not merely a face. It is that which we, or the systems we use, wish to read into it.”

Sheung Yiu (HK/FI) is an image-centered artist and researcher. His artwork explores imaging practices emerging at the intersection of ubiquitous photography and large-scale computation. He looks at photography through the lens of new media, scales, and network thinking. He ponders how the posthuman cyborg vision and the technology that produces it transform ways of seeing and knowledge-making. Adopting multi-disciplinary collaboration and image studies as a mode of research, his works examine the poetics and politics of algorithmic image systems, such as computer vision, computer graphics, and remote sensing, to understand how to see something where there is nothing, how to digitize light, and how vision becomes predictions. His work takes the form of photography, video essays, exhibition installations, and artist’s books.



Participant: Sheung Yiu (HK/FI)
Curators: Inga Brūvere (LV), Marie Sjøvold (NO)
Text author: Aiga Dzalbe (LV)
Image: Sheung Yiu, from the series “Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face”, 2023-