Junpeng Liang + Weixi Kuang

Bactereature (Series) 2024.
Microbial Pigment Biopolymers
Bio-based polymer composite; fixed microbial pigment

MW : Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

WK + JL : We are Weixi Kuang and Junpeng Liang, a London-based artist duo. Our current practice sits at the intersection of bio-art, material engineering, computational design, digital fabrication, and speculative/critical design.

We build research-driven workflows where living pigmentation, diffusion, and time become visual languages - translated into sculptural forms and design narratives that invite viewers to sense processes that are usually invisible.

MW : How did the two of you meet, and when did you both decide to work together?

WK + JL : We met during an international collaborative design workshop organized through our undergraduate program. At the time, we were both drawn to bio-art, material-driven making, and speculative/critical approaches to technology.

We began creating work together in 2022, and the collaboration has since developed into a shared practice that moves between experimentation and storytelling- building systems and materials that carry both method and meaning.

MW : Can you tell us a little bit more about your research-driven material processes?

JL : We treat research as a way of composing material experiences, not as a purely technical exercise. The project begins with a design question: how can an invisible biological process become something a viewer can read-through color, texture, and time?

From there, we work iteratively, moving between design, making,and observation. We generate a small family of surface variations, test them under consistent conditions, and document how color appears, migrates, and settles over days rather than minutes. The “research” is the rhythm of this loop: designing conditions, watching what the material returns, and refining the next iteration so the work becomes both intentional and alive.

WK : For me, the process is also a narrative method. We’re not aiming to “control” biology into a fixed image; we’re staging an encounter where color can emerge as evidence of living time. The material tests create a language - gradients, boundaries, residues- that viewers can sense without specialist knowledge. In that sense, research becomes a form of storytelling: it turns cultivation, care, and uncertainty into a readable surface.

MW : Collaboration seems embedded both between the two of you and microbial systems. How does decision-making shift when biological agents participate in making?

WK : When biological agents participate, decision-making becomes less about imposing an image and more about setting a scene. We don’t treat microbes as a material that obediently follows a plan; we approach them as collaborators whose behavior carries its own rhythms.

Our role is to define conditions - a threshold of moisture, a duration of exposure, a surface that can receive - and then allow the work to unfold. That shift is also conceptual: it asks what it means to author with something you cannot fully command, and how care, restraint, and uncertainty become part of the artwork’s meaning.

JL : On my side, the practical decisions are always made with the final experience in mind:

How will a viewer read this?

Instead of “choosing” a color outcome, we tune the factors that shape how color becomes visible over time - whether it forms a broad gradient, a sharper trace, or a lingering deposit. What matters is the translation: these choices become a visual vocabulary that carries narrative.

A slow migration can read as drift or weathering; a boundary can read as a threshold; residue can read as memory.

The technical work is only there to make that vocabulary consistent enough to be legible, so the concept can arrive through the surface rather than through explanation.

MW : How has working with feedback systems or microbial communities reshaped how you understand collaboration between yourselves as a duo?

JL : Working with microbial communities keeps us in a state of openness. Biology doesn’t behave like a stable material - color can intensify, drift, stall, or disappear - so we’ve learned not to treat outcomes as something to be “secured,” but as something to be met.

We follow our own method to stay coherent, yet we actively invite the unknown: the most interesting moments often arrive when the microbes respond in ways we didn’t anticipate. There’s a slight sense of risk in that - an edge of unpredictability that we don’t try to eliminate. Instead, we treat it as part of the collaboration, because it’s where new visual languages and new questions emerge.

WK : That openness reshapes how we work together. Rather than forcing agreement too early, we hold space for ambiguity and let the material guide the conversation.

In practice, Junpeng often pushes for legibility - how the system can be read- while I push for meaning- what the work is saying and what it ethically implies. The microbial agent becomes a third collaborator that prevents the work
from becoming purely conceptual or purely technical.

It keeps authorship distributed: between our roles, the material, and the living dynamics that exceed our control.

MW : Algorithmic modeling often seeks optimization. Are there moments where inefficiency or slowness becomes conceptually interesting and important within a growth-based system?

JL : Absolutely - within growth-based systems, slowness isn’t a drawback, it’s the medium.

Diffusion needs time to reveal structure: boundaries soften, gradients accumulate, residues settle, and color can intensify, drift, or fade. If I “optimized” too hard toward a single clean outcome, I would erase the very phenomena the work is trying to make visible. So I use computation less as an optimizer and more as a way to hold a field of controlled variation - different surface conditions and parameters that let me compare how time performs on matter.

Conceptually, that slowness matters because it resists the industrial fantasy of instant, permanent results. It reframes “finish” as something conditional: a surface that is always becoming rather than completed. The viewer doesn’t encounter color as a fixed coating, but as a time-based event - an index of duration, care, and environment.

In that sense, inefficiency becomes productive:
it is where new visual language appears, and where the work’s meaning is carried by change itself.

MW : With Bactereature, can you tell us a little bit more about the design of your exhibition layout, material apparatus, and the printed bio-based polymer composite forms?

WK + JL : In the exhibition, we present Bactereature as a small ecology rather than a single object. The installation consists of fourteen sculptures, each generated through an algorithmic process and then colored through microbial staining. Instead of treating the supports as neutral plinths, we designed a dedicated stand for each piece, and beneath each stand sits a glass vessel containing the bacterial solution. This setup quietly points to the work’s making - color emerging through a liquid medium - while also shifting the emphasis from “process display” to an atmosphere of cultivation.

Each stand can be read as a self-contained unit: a body, a reserve, and a condition. Together, the fourteen units form a field of variations, where viewers move between distinct presences rather than identical repetitions.

The sculptural forms hold the traces of time - gradients, deposits, edges - while the vessels below suggest the living origin of color. In this way, the exhibition layout becomes part of the work’s narrative: it frames each sculpture as an individual “organism” within a shared system, inviting viewers to sense how computation, material, and microbial agency co-author form.

MW : With Bactereature, the use of color becomes structural rather than applied. How has this changed how you think about ornament, affect, or emotional response in material design?

WK : In Bactereature, color is not something added to a surface - it is something the surface produces through time. That shift changes how I understand ornament.

Ornament stops being decoration and becomes a trace of relationship: between a living agent, a material body, and a set of conditions. The “pattern” is not designed and then executed; it emerges as gradients, tide lines, and residues that record how the work has been inhabited by moisture, diffusion, and metabolism.

This also changes affect. Because the color can intensify, drift, and fade, the work carries a sense of vulnerability and duration rather than instant impact. It invites a slower kind of attention - closer to reading a stain, a scar, or a weathered surface - where feeling is tied to time and care. For me, the emotional response comes from recognizing that the surface is not finished; it is becoming. And that “unfinishedness” is not failure, but a different ethic of making - one that allows living processes to leave their own handwriting.

MW : Your materials record time through gradients and staining. Do you think of these marks as archives, evidence of care, or something different?

JL : I read them as temporal data - records of flow, contact, and duration. A gradient is a history of migration; a deposit is a history of retention. When you document the same surface over time, the mark becomes comparable evidence: you can see how conditions shift behaviour, and how “living time” becomes visible.

WK : I read them as an archive, but not a neutral one. They’re evidence of care - of keeping a living process legible - and also evidence of limits: what can’t be controlled, what fades, what persists. The archive matters because it refuses permanence. It proposes that change itself can be a material language, and that what we preserve is not a final state but a relationship unfolding in time.

MW : How do you document processes that are fundamentally temporal and metabolic rather than object-based? Is documentation analytical, poetic, or both?

JL : For me, documentation is part of the design language. Because the process is temporal, I treat images as a form of notation - consistent viewpoints over time that let color be read as movement, thresholds, and residue. It turns the work into something legible as an evolving event, not a fixed object.

WK : And it’s also poetic.

The sequences hold atmosphere - care, waiting, uncertainty - so viewers can feel that the surface has lived through time. Documentation doesn’t sit outside the artwork; it’s where meaning and material change meet.

MW : You describe a future of manufacturing that is “more alive.” If these systems became widely adopted in architecture or manufacturing, what cultural and environmental shifts would you hope to see?

WK + JL : We would hope for a shift from extraction and surface “sealing” toward care, transparency, and circular thinking. A more alive manufacturing culture treats conditions and maintenance as part of design - where change, patina, and repair are not framed as failure, but as meaningful states.

Environmentally, it opens space for low toxicity, bio-based color and finishing, reducing reliance on petroleum-derived coatings and hidden chemical processes.

Just as important is how these systems are held and governed. If living processes enter making, then responsibility has to enter with them: clear boundaries, traceable decisions, and an honest account of what is cultivated, what is contained, and what impacts a process carries.

For us, “more alive” does not mean romanticizing the living - it means designing with non-human agency while staying accountable, so that ethics is not an afterthought but something you can read in the surface.

( This interview was conducted by Material Works ( MW ) in the spring of 2026 )

Junpeng Liang + Weixi Kuang