Photo Credit: Bre Pettis

Licia He

Licia He paints with a robot she treats like a colleague. Born in China in 1992, she earned a PhD in information science at the University of Michigan, taught at Texas A&M — where she founded the Generative Craft Lab — and in 2023 left the professorship to make art full time; she now works from Tokyo. Her practice is the plotter painting: algorithms she writes drive a three-axis machine that dips into real ink and watercolor and paints on paper, a near-daily discipline she has kept since 2019. I met her when she was living in London and got a tour of the studio, which was really her entire living room given over to the work — AxiDraws and NextDraws everywhere, the whole thing driven by her own Python. Running Moon (Art Blocks, 2022) and Fictional Lullaby (Feral File, 2023) came from it, along with a solo show at Gazelli Art House in London and Painting With Plotters at the V&A. For Please Respond (2026) she was the seventh link, disrupting Juan Pedro Vallejo's black-and-white grid with isometric hatching.

Artist's website (eyesofpanda.com) ↗

1 physical work