Shan Shui

"Qianxun Chen is an artist and designer who has a strong interest in languages and interactive media.

Shan Shui generates landscape paintings and corresponding texts, parts of which are glossed in English when the user mouses over them. The English-language reader gains a perspective on the text, but (as if reading through intense fog) can make out only one or two characters at time, losing the forest through the trees. One relationship is to work that pairs landscapes and poems, such as Ed Falco and Mary Pinto's Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales; another is to systems that generates paired images and texts, such as Talan Memmont's Self Portraits(s) [as Other(s)]. Also relevant are John Cayley's literary texts, some in Chinese, that provide glosses and translations." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Three