lololol

Xia Lin and Sheryl Cheung
Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan

Email: info@lololol.net

lololol is a boundless laughter, an endless extension of lol (laugh out loud), an acronym that appears to be constructed by the building blocks of I-Ching and/or computer code. Founded by Sheryl Cheung and Xia Lin in 2013, the artist duo focuses on how emotions and body politics are informed by diverse technology cultures, with special interest in martial arts, materialist ontologies and perceptual impacts of technology on contemporary life, examining body philosophy, and the cognitive processes and progressions between humans and machines. This has led to a unique interpretation of Asian philosophy, mind-body practices as an alternative approach to technological exploration.

In 2020, lololol initiated art project Future Tao which focuses on the cultivation of energies, power relations, and attunement methodologies through embodied performance. With an emphasis on unraveling the complex relationship between technological things, nature, and human beings, the project draws from Taoist approaches to good living in order to navigate the mind and body politics that we live in everyday.

Recent exhibitions and performances include the Singapore Biennale (2025), Jeju Biennale (2024), The Block Museum, Illinois (2024), PS122 Gallery, New York (2023), Taipei Arts Festival (2023), MoCA Taipei (2022), Vernacular Institute, Mexico (2022), Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2021), Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (2019), and Flaneur Festival at HKW, Berlin (2019).

lololol_online lololol.online

Works

Fractal Memory #3
2026
Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

Light Keeper: Signal
2025
Three-Channel Video, Stereo Sound
7’58”

Light Keeper
2025
GPS-Enabled Sound Guide, Light Installation
Dimensions Variable

3C Xing Yi Quan: Sparring
2025
Three-Channel Video, 5760x1080 Projection, Stereo Sound
9’10”

Fractal Memory #2
2024
Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

Ear Root Tropism / Sheryl Cheung
2024
Script, Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

CultivatingSteps
2024
Video and Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

Mt. Jade is in Metamorphoses: Nonlinear
2024
Single-Channel Video, Stereo Sound, Installation
12’00”

Sun Moon Lake is a Concrete Box: Revisited
2024
Video and Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

Wafer Bearer Deep Rain
2022
Single-Channel Video, Stereo Sound
12’00”

Clear Calm Free Human / Sheryl Cheung
2021
Video of Online Performance
10’30”

Shadow Expert
2024
Daily Capture, Generative Images, Inkjet Print
40x40cm

Future Tao: The Great Shift
2021
VR360, Stereo Sound, Script, Inkjet Print
Dimensions Variable

BreathCultivating
2021
Video with Sound Installation, Exciter
Dimensions Variable

Surface Habitat
2021
Two-Channel Video, No Sound
4’30”

3C Xing Yi Quan: Program
2020
Video and Sound Installation
12’00”

Fractal Memory #1
2019
Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

Little Dragon Soup / Sheryl Cheung
2019
Scripture, Sound, Herbal Medicine
Dimensions Variable

3C Xing Yi Quan / Xia Lin
2017 - to present
Workshop Activities, Script, Document
Dimensions Variable

Make_A_Wish.JPG
2016
JPG file, Video and Sound Installation
Dimensions Variable

Distraction Improvement Class
2013
A Series of 4 Interactive Web Pages
Dimensions Variable

Performance

Drifting Beacon
2026
Live Performance @SAM, SG
30 mins

Sun Moon Lake is a Concrete Box: Revisited
2024
Sound Performance
20 mins

Mt. Jade is in Metamorphoses
2023
Expanded Cinema, Landscape performance
60 mins

Clear Calm Free Human
2021
Online Performance
60 mins

Surface Habitat
2021
Livestream Screen-Based Performance, Mute
60 mins

Sun Moon Lake is a Concrete Box
2020
Expanded Cinema, Landscape Performance
60 mins

Little Dragon Soup / Sheryl Cheung
2019
Sound Performance
30 mins

Future Tao
2017
Sound Performance
30 mins

2025
Three-channel video installation, Stereo Sound
7 min 58 sec
Courtesy of the Artist

Singapore Biennale 2025 Commission

Light Keeper: Signal explores the concept of technological consciousness through a fictional story of wayfinding, drawing on lololol’s personal experiences of navigating contemporary technological life, as well as on their encounters with lighthouses, their keepers, and crypto-linguists. The work reflects on the dynamics between humans, their tools and our environment in order to project towards a present-future in which humans must recalibrate mind and body to co-work with new forms of technological approaches, approaches, and relational orders. The work serves as a companion to Light Keeper, situated at Fort Canning Park, comprising a site-specific Sound Walk and a light installation at the Fort Canning Lighthouse.

When we were approached by the biennial for a commissioned work last year, the landscape of navigational tools on the internet were rapidly changing with the arrival of AI. We grew up with internet tools that often borrowed from maritime motifs. This inspired us to draw closer to Asia’s history of navigational technology, and human’s innate need to move between the known and unknown. We took the opportunity to personally visit many lighthouses and their keepers to learn first hand on close relationship between human and machine.

During our visits to lighthouses in Taiwan, we were in awe to learn about the intimate relationship the lighthouse keepers had with the lights that which they guarded. Their daily lives revolved around the maintenance of the light and keeping it always on at night. This bond between man and machine truly reflected a modern vision of technological consciousness. One lighthouse keeper shared to us that he would dream of lighthouses so pristine and beautiful, ‘like lanterns on buddhist altars.’ The transcendence of this relationship inspired the narrative of our three-channel installation, which speaks of navigation from a fictional keeper’s point of view.

2025
GPS-enabled sound walk and light Installation

Singapore Biennale 2025 Commission

Light Keeper explores the poetics and politics of navigation in an evolving technological landscape. The project guides audiences through sound, video and light, offering an experience of technological consciousness which reveals the dynamics between humans, tools, and environment. The project features a sound walk through Fort Canning Park and a light installation at the Fort Canning Lighthouse. Together, they extend the site's history of maritime and message encryption by transforming the park into a journey of discovery and exploration. Visitors are guided to five sites via a GPS-enabled app, immersing themselves in a narrative shaped by the artist's encounters with lighthouses, their keepers and crypto-linguists. These sonic vignettes evoke reflection through memory, instinct, and curiosity. At the Fort Canning Lighthouse, a programmed light cycle presents a looped sequence—which builds upon a lightkeeper's dreams of perfect illumination and the artist's encounters of illuminated awe. The light shimmers in the sky like a continual rewrite of a secret scripture written through air.

Installation view of lololol's Light Keeper (2025) at Fort Canning Lighthouse. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Our interest in creating Light Keeper at the Fort Canning Park grew from the idea of 迷航 — the state of being adrift, or navigating through uncertainty. The network of paths in the park offers a nonlinear journey and encourage the audience to utilize their innate motivations to seek and explore trajectories of their own. The experience of city parks has always been an inspiration of us, especially as a site of staging mind and body practices. At Fort Canning, what also drew our attention was its historical relevance to Singapore’s maritime history as a site that overlooked the Singapore river. We wanted to create a journey for the viewers to bodily move through and encounter as an augmented reality of the park.

Click or Scan QR code:

Artist / Writer and Director: lololol
Sound Composition: Sheryl Cheung
Camera and Video Editor: Xia Lin
Lighting Software Coordination: Xin Yu Zhang
Administration Support: Chieh-Ting Liu

Portions of this video include licensed footage provided by the Maritime Port Bureau. MOTC, as well as sound recordings from the BBC Sound Effects Archive.

Thanks to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA), Maritime Port Bureau. MOTC, Lu Hsueh-Feng, Liu Shao-Chi, Yang Ya-Liang, Chang Wei-Lun, Mao Ling-Long, Chi Yong-Teh, Tyson Liu, Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, Hsu Fang-Tze.

2025
Three-channel video installation, stereo sound
9 min 10 sec

3C Xing Yi Quan: Sparring refers to a training method in which humans and technological objects engage in paired routines and coordinated movements based on forms and postures. This work continues the artist’s long-term project 3C Xing Yi Quan, initiated in 2017—an open-source, contemporary internal martial art system. “3C” broadly refers to computers, communication, and consumer electronics. While traditional Xing Yi Quan draws on the behavioral ecology of animals in nature, 3C Xing Yi Quan reflects on the ubiquitous technological devices that have come to define a new kind of natural environment in everyday life.

Through informed movements, the exercise fosters deeper understanding of familiar technological gadgets that are an intimate part of our daily lives. The highest ‘Xing Yi 形意’ is ‘to be’, learn from these products by imitation, experience, and cohabitation, in order to find a sense of symbiosis and enjoyment with our new technological nature.

Installation view. Photo: Wen-Ling Lin, Zhe-Zhi Lin

2022
Single-channel video installation, Stereo Sound
12’00”

Drawing from lololol’s personal experience working in the tech industry, Wafer Bearer Deep Rain is a single-channel video installation that meditates on the pervasive force of semiconductors on Taiwan’s contemporary psyche.

In the past 40 years, Taiwan’s chip manufacturing capabilities has transformed the island nation into a global epicenter of technological production. Within this system, technical objects are continuously produced, exhausted, discarded, and reborn—processes that remain deeply entangled with everyday life and collective identity of Taiwanese society.

The video interweaves a dream-like sequence of immersion, fabrication, spinning, and urban work-life environments that power and are powered by semiconductors. The soundtrack blends between mechanical operations, slowed corporate choruses, and recordings from a qigong practitioner.

The refined process of tempering a technical object is akin to the disciplined training of a martial artist, in which the mind and body is continually sculpted and cultivated into technological greatness.

Riding the high and low tides of windy rain, coming and goings cause an invisible stirring. A wafer cassette flows and drifts in a dynamic state of symbiotic co-existence.

Still of Wafer Bearer Deep Rain, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

Installation View of Wafer Bearer Deep Rain, 2022. Photo Courtesy: MOCA Taipei / ANPIS FOTO

2026
Sound installation
Dimensions variable

Fractal memory (2019-ongoing) is a series of sound installations composed of broken HDD hard drives amplified through contact microphones, analog mixer, and mono-speakers. The soundscape of memory in operation consists of mechanical motions and malfunctioning noises, revealing how human memory is read and written through computers and machines, while seeking new meaning in the afterlife of discarded devices.

Fractals of Memory #3 features five hard disk drives (HDDs) manufactured between the 1990s and 2000s. Different rotational speeds, silent technologies, startup mechanisms, and mechanical designs produce multiple layers of sound. During this historical period, technology witnessed how the rapid evolution of HDDs stimulated the rise of personal computers, making them a central force in cultural production. Though the drives from this period are unreadable, their sonic characteristic preserve the technological materiality of its time, encapsulating humanity’s expectations of technology of the time.

Installation view of Fractal Memory #3.

2024
Sound installation
Dimensions variable

Fractal memory (2019-ongoing) is a series of sound installations composed of broken HDD hard drives amplified through contact microphones, analog mixer, and mono-speakers. The soundscape of memory in operation consists of mechanical motions and malfunctioning noises, revealing how human memory is read and written through computers and machines, while seeking new meaning in the afterlife of discarded devices.

Fractals of Memory #2 consists of eight 2.5-inch hard drives emitting soft, slow operational clicks, accompanied by the artist’s improvised piano recording broadcast from a loudspeaker. The delicate, repetitive rhythm is driven by the drives’ continual attempt to read and remember, evoking a feeling of suspended time, while the piano challenges this suspension through its immediate emotional engagement with the present.

Installation view of Fractal Memory. Photo Courtesy: Solid Art / ANPIS FOTO

Installation view of Fractal Memory #2. Photo Courtesy: Solid Art / ANPIS FOTO

2019
sound installation
Dimensions variable

Fractal memory (2019-ongoing) is a series of sound installations composed of broken HDD hard drives amplified through contact microphones, analog mixer, and mono-speakers. The soundscape of memory in operation consists of mechanical motions and malfunctioning noises, revealing how human memory is read and written through computers and machines, while seeking new meaning in the afterlife of discarded devices.

Fractals of Memory #1 focuses on the startup of the hard drive—the sonic burst upon powering on is a physical event occurring simultaneously within an extremely short span of time, compressed into a single sonic impression. Rapid torque changes generate sounds of compression and expansion. The damaged hard drives continuously reboot, their rising and falling sounds repeatedly attempting to drive read/write operations, expressing a form of mechanical resilience and vitality.

Installation view of Fractal Memory #1 .

Installation view of Fractal Memory #1.

2021
4K video，exciter
Dimensions variable

BreathCultivating is an encrypted file composed of various breathing sounds. 66 sources of breathing vibrations including: earthlings, computer mimics, MEMEs and primates. When the pandemic began in 2020, the human activity interface turned to rely on the virtual world, seeking to establish a universal way to regulate the symbiotic relationship between the inner and outer spaceof the network.

Installation view of BreathCultivating, 2021, 4K video, exciter, installation, dimensions variable. Photo: ANPIS FOTO