In Conversation With Wendi Yan

As part of Interact 2026 Admissions, we’re interviewing members of the Interact community so applicants can get a sense of who we are. Charles Yang, on this year’s admissions committee, caught up with Wendi Yan.

Wendi Yan is an artist, writer, and technologist who uses CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to build speculative worlds rooted in the history of science. Her films, games, and installations imagine alternative scientific progress — what technologies might exist if Eastern and Western knowledge systems had collided differently, what a resurrected woolly mammoth might feel growing up in our time, what microbial life might look like in the sulfuric clouds of Venus. She recently won the Grand Prix of the 6th VH Award by Hyundai Motor Group for Dream of Walnut Palaces, a CGI film that follows a fictional Daoist scholar through an imagined 1780s Paris.

Thanks for joining us, Wendi! To start off: do you want to share a little bit about your journey into art? How did you get into the craft and why did you specifically choose the digital mediums you work with?

I grew up in Beijing, and back in middle school, my dream was to design characters and environments for games. I didn’t know about “art” in the formal sense—I just wanted to do concept design, so I took digital illustration classes.

When I came to the States for high school, I took an oil painting class and found that medium actually felt much more natural to me. I got very lucky with a teacher who told me immediately that I could become a “professional artist” in the future. At the time, I was like, What is that? What do you actually mean by professional artist?

So I started reading all the books in my art classroom about contemporary art. I became obsessed with it, effectively teaching myself by reading and visiting museums—at one point, I was going to more than 100 shows a year in China and the US. That period really helped develop my taste. The things that drew me most were digital artworks shown in museum contexts—pieces by artists like Ian Cheng or Lu Yang. They were using 3D technologies and animation software to push the boundaries of storytelling. Even though I didn’t know how to make those things yet, I was captivated by how they used digital mediums to shape narratives.

Marshall McLuhan famously coined the aphorism “the medium is the message.” How do you think about digital art specifically as a medium? What do you appreciate about it?

There are a lot of tools you can use within digital art, but I specifically use CGI software where you make 3D models of characters or objects, assemble them into environments, run virtual cameras inside, and animate them into stories, or program them into games.

It’s very easy to feel like you’re kind of close to God when you’re in Unreal Engine. You can literally paint the landscape, sculpt humans, and they will move and look very real. What’s exciting for me is that one person can imagine a whole world without relying on other people’s help. If you do a very good job with world-building, you can immerse somebody in a virtual realm that might have a different cosmology, different physics, or different ideas of nature.

In the real world, if you want to change something, you have to spend a lot of effort going around convincing people and push hard for changes. That’s not really my strength. I want to make sci-fi media that seed other ways of looking at our world’s story. Even though they do not directly affect the physical world, narratives do influence how people live their lives, and my hope is that something from my imagined worlds sticks for different people: a visual language, a historical reference, or maybe a new way to ask the important questions.

A lot of your work involves collaborations with scientists, like working with MIT scientists to imagine exoplanets. How do you find these stories, and how do you situate your work given the current state of science funding and public trust?

I studied the history of science in college, and when I looked at Nobel Prize winners or groundbreaking figures, I realized that early in their careers, they were often the “crazy” people. They had ideas that others thought were impossible, or they focused on areas that others deemed unpromising. But they had a unique vision and the boldness to pursue it.

I think the capability to imagine something very different—and the courage to go after that imagination despite what others think—is a trait shared by visionary scientists and artists. So whether I’m working with a friend or a scientist at MIT, it’s always about mutually imagining something together.

This connects to how I think about science communication. When I was younger, I had this naive understanding that knowledge building was like stacking bricks. I thought you discover a fact, you make a “brick,” and then someone else puts a brick on top, and you just keep stacking them endlessly. I assumed you never had to go back and take the bricks away—that once something was discovered, it was a solid, permanent step forward.

Of course, I realized that is very much not true. Science is much messier; bricks get taken away all the time. But what became even more interesting to me was the individual courage required to try to figure things out when the path isn’t solid. When your mind is trying to comprehend something way larger than you, how do you proceed? I’m intrigued by that bigger idea of epistemical courage. That struggle and sense of wonder are what I try to capture.

You wrote a piece for Asimov Press about how Chinese scientists discovered artemisinin — the antimalarial drug that’s saved millions of lives — by going back to a 1,700-year-old medical text inside a secret military project during the Cultural Revolution. It’s a fascinating story and counter to how we often imagine scientific discoveries happening. What inspired you to write this story?

It was very important for me to write that article. I was talking to a friend who mentioned Tu Youyou, a household name in China, as someone people here don’t really know. That seeded something in me. I thought there was value in her story because it’s so weird.

We have friends who work in science funding, and identifying talent is so complicated. Tu Youyou’s story is valuable because it shows that sometimes discoveries happen in really unexpected ways. It was a massive science effort in China during the least scientific time—the Cultural Revolution. Mao was so against Western science that they decided to do “Chinese science,” which led them to look into old Chinese medicine books.

But the discovery wouldn’t have happened if Tu Youyou didn’t have proper training in chemistry as well. She had both. It’s a story where things came together in weird ways due to circumstances, and I just wanted to offer that different perspective.

Given the rapid pace of development we’re seeing in AI, I’m curious if you have any thoughts on how you’re thinking about AI in media right now?

To be honest, I feel pretty existential every day. I follow AI closely, and since I finished my last project half a year ago, it’s gotten so much better.

I had a very intriguing conversation with a creative technologist friend. I told him about a day where I immersed myself in making videos entirely with AI. I was prompting, mixing weird images, and getting exciting results. But about half an hour later, I started feeling almost psychologically nauseous at the things I was creating. I couldn’t tell why, because objectively the images were intriguing.

He immediately said: “That’s because you were consuming at that point.”

There is something about the speed of creating with AI that makes it very easy to slip from creating to consuming. That boundary is super blurry now. You think you’re creating, but you’re actually just watching AI make “proto-TV” for you.

I’m thinking about that a lot. When I was making storyboards recently for a film entirely using AI, I didn’t feel that nausea. That’s because I had a story in my head, I knew the character, I knew the environment. AI was completely just a tool for me to explore my story. I think I still need to think more about what that switch is—when are you actually making the decisions versus letting AI do things for you?

Do you have an interact story to share with us?

I feel like Interact changed my life, actually. A lot of critical moments and projects happened through my friends at Interact.

I joined in 2021 when I was 22, in my sophomore year of college. I applied without really thinking it was going to be anything important—I assumed it was a startup incubator and I wasn’t interested in startups. But indeed, it was very different.

I think a lot of Interact people, no matter what they do, have so much willpower. They have this self-initiating energy. There is a lot of optimism about, “Okay, I can figure this out.” That wasn’t very natural to me personally, even though I consciously wanted to build that muscle.

The moment I joined and started meeting people, that energy was palpable. It didn’t matter that what they did was totally different from what I did. It made me approach my own things differently. Now, when I go into professional situations where people are pessimistic or have a very locked-in framework of how things are done, I feel like I have to push against that for myself. I remember, Wait, it’s not actually like that. That’s just their version of how things are done. Having Interact in my heart helps a lot.

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If any part of Tomas’s experience or ideas resonated with you, you should apply for Interact 2026 Fellowship! Applications open until February 9th.