Aaron Deng is a multi-disciplinary artist focusing on the gap between digital design, motion graphics and synchronized audio-visual experiences. In this interview, Deng illuminates the analog and digital conflation in his independent project DICTE, the possibilities of immersion within graphic design, and the experience he had working on ‘Pop Girl’ for Lexie Liu.

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Your independent project, DICTE, uses visual and audio sensations to explore the naturalistic elements Earth, Water, Fire and Wind. What draws you to traverse and conflate the digital and natural within your independent projects?

I was really interested in how audio behaves differently in analog and digital media,  which led me to experiment with sound-driven visuals. I became drawn to interactive design quite early on, and TouchDesigner was a starting point for that exploration. 

In college, I took a class called Device Art, where I built a small interactive device using Arduino and an ultrasonic sensor—when someone moved closer, the audio and generative visuals would respond in real time. That project was a small experiment, but it introduced me to considering visuals as something that can react to sound and movement. 

DICTE by Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

​DICTE by Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

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How much of your work is concerned with immersion – this idea of creating environments and experiences for your viewer through your creative direction?

Yes—through collaborating with different kinds of people and across different contexts, I’ve been exploring how immersion can be constructed in different ways.  In formats like music videos or live shows, it’s very direct because visuals are part of the performance. They have to work together with lighting,  production design, styling, and even the performers themselves, all supporting one another to create a cohesive environment and experience. 

Pop Girl - Lexie Liu Music Video. Director: Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

In a constrained context, such as graphic design, the approach varies.  Since there isn’t a physical space in the same sense, immersion comes more from building a visual language - through typography, color, imagery, and layout systems - allowing these elements to extend across different formats. When they appear across posters, packaging, motion, or digital platforms, they begin to form a coherent atmosphere rather than isolated design pieces. For me, that’s another way immersion can exist within graphic design. 

Caroline Polachek, DESIRE, I WANT TO TURN INTO YOU. Vinyl Package Design with Studio Pending. © Aaron Deng

​Caroline Polachek, DESIRE, I WANT TO TURN INTO YOU 2025 Calendar design with Studio Pending © Aaron Deng

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Many of your projects stem from a wider variety of collaborations with artists, commercial brands, and fashion designers. How important has it been to work with such a diverse range of clients? What inspiration have you gained from them?

I really enjoy collaborating with creatives. Every industry has different needs, which means the emphasis in visual work also shifts accordingly. Through these diverse collaborations, I’ve learned to understand and adapt to different priorities while still maintaining my own artistic voice. 

I also like moving between different contexts. That sense of transition keeps me sensitive and curious, and prevents me from getting stuck in a single, fixed mode of expression. 

Designs for AA CLUB, active wear brand by Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

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Your artistic direction for Lexie Liu’s music video ‘Pop Girl’ further thrust your career last year. The video explores the contemporary necessity of perfectionism in the digital age. What drew you to incorporating these ideas into the video’s design and narrative?

The idea for ‘Pop Girl’ started from a simple observation. Today, our self-image is shaped and amplified through screens and social media, where  “perfection” often becomes something constantly pursued and performed. I  was interested in how identity can almost become a kind of product in that environment. 

In the video, we approached ‘Pop Girl’ like a manufactured icon—something polished, staged, presented and consumed. Visually, we leaned into that idea through a very glossy, almost commercial atmosphere, with stage-like spaces and highly controlled imagery. It looks very perfect on the surface, but there’s also an artificial quality to it. That tension between perfection and unreality reflects how digital culture constructs idealized identities today. 

Pop Girl - Lexie Liu Music Video. Director: Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

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Your career began largely operating within Shanghai’s music and fashion video scene before your later move to New York. What differences have you noticed between these two cosmopolitan spaces in terms of their artistic sensibilities?

I think Shanghai has been developing incredibly quickly. In recent years, market demand has grown rapidly. For creatives, it’s a friendly environment due to the commercial opportunities.  New brands and platforms keep emerging, and visual work can extend into many different areas of the market—such as designer brands, lifestyle stores, advertising,  and so on—constantly creating new visual needs. 

New York, on the other hand, feels like a place where many industries are quite mature and have a longer history of development. The structures of collaboration across different fields are more established, and projects often have clearer role divisions. At the same time, because people from all over the world work here, the creative environment is very diverse. 

But at the same time, I also feel that many of these differences are gradually becoming smaller. Today, almost everyone in the world is communicating within the same online space. Contents and creative work are constantly being shared and reposted across different platforms. As visibility increases, the boundaries between cities—and even between industries—are becoming less distinct.

Lexie Liu THE HAPPY STAR Album Package Design. © Aaron Deng

Pop Girl - Lexie Liu Music Video. Director: Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

Designs for AA CLUB, active wear brand by Aaron Deng. © Aaron Deng

Designs for GONE GOLD by Lexie Liu. © Aaron Deng

The 61st Venice Biennale certainly did not get off to the best start. In May 2025, Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh passed away unexpectedly. She was set to become the first African director of the renowned international art exhibition. This was followed by heated controversies regarding the reopening of the Russian Pavilion and the presence of the Israeli Pavilion. Then, the international jury resigned en masse, refusing to consider the two countries. Next came the decision to let visitors vote. After that, 52 artists and curators, along with 16 national participants, withdrew from the competition for the new Visitors’ Lions. Pussy Riot, the Russian anti-Putin feminist collective, showed up to protest in support of the dissidents. Finally, on May 8, there was a strike. Some national pavilions closed, and a procession of demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags slowly moved through the city. 

Geopolitics and the Limits of the Biennale System

One might say that it is a start that is anything but low-key, paraphrasing the title of this edition. It is an inevitable consequence of the geopolitical complexity that characterizes our present. Many global factors intertwine, making it difficult to predict the balance of power among states. This complexity cannot be addressed by a completely obsolete model—a legacy of European cultural diplomacy. Imagine a large public park—the Gardens, the nerve center of the event—dotted with buildings representing nation-states. Each building serves as a bearer of its own art, an expression of its own aesthetic codes, and a vehicle for its own message. In times of peace, this system, organized into orderly patterns and developed in the early 20th century as a tool of cultural diplomacy, probably made sense. In a multipolar, unstable, and increasingly conflict-ridden world, the Biennale system reveals its artificial simplicity. With all due respect to those who believe Venice is a space for dialogue and interaction among people, everything here takes on political significance. Reopening a pavilion is a political act, as is refusing an award. So is organizing an exhibition whose title itself is a statement and a challenge to the idea that dominant ideas, even artistic ones, must come from the ruling class or the economic and financial elite. This elite promotes a frighteningly single-minded and hegemonic way of thinking.

Koyo Kouoh. ©Mehdi Benkler

Koyo Kouoh’s Vision for “In Minor Keys”

According to Kouoh’s vision, this is “an exhibition tuned in to the minor keys; an exhibition that invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies. If, in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow, here their joy, solace, hope, and transcendence manifest as well.” Following her passing, the team she had chosen—Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira and Rasha Salti (advisors); Siddhartha Mitter (editor-in-chief); Rory Tsapayi (research assistant)—assumed the responsibility of developing the project according to the curator's guidelines.The result is a polyphonic composition in which 111 invited artists—including individuals, duos, collectives, and artist-led organizations—from diverse geographical areas and regions participate. The goal is to create a transnational artistic map based on migration, cultural exchange, and global networks. Artists from the African continent are particularly well represented, and several others are connected to Caribbean and Latin American contexts. There is also no shortage of artists from or working in the Middle East, Asia, North America, and Europe. The outcome is a constellation of relationships that is not always easy to decipher. This is partly because the exhibition is structured around conceptual themes rather than traditional sections. This creates a fluid composition guided by underlying thematic currents. The "Shrines" motif featured in the Sala Chini pays tribute to two artists: Issa Samb (Senegal, 1945–2017) and Beverly Buchanan (USA, 1940–2015). Samb was a key figure in the Laboratoire Agit’Art in Dakar, and Buchanan was known for her land art and anti-monumental public sculptures related to memory and place. Both artists conceived of art as a generative process that transcends the object itself. Inspired by carnival and Afro-Atlantic traditions, the processions invite the public to participate rather than observe, challenging dominant narratives and archives. The “Schools,” on the other hand, represent ecosystems of collaborative learning that are locally rooted yet internationally connected. The performances highlight the body as a vessel for knowledge and resistance. One such performance is a poetic procession inspired by Kouoh’s 1999 Poetry Caravan from Dakar to Timbuktu. This procession pays homage to the griot storytelling tradition.

Beverly Buchanan. Photography Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art

“In Minor Keys” is situated within the framework of postcolonial discourse as applied to art, which has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it offers a pluralistic narrative involving participants from various cultures. However, there is an excessive focus on recognizing the “other,” which seems to validate the works based almost exclusively on their place of origin. This inevitably leads to oversimplification. Simplifying, reducing things to categories, and constructing clear, delimited—and consequently limiting—narrative frameworks is precisely what art does under the hegemony of capital. This is the same hegemony that has made art part of consumer culture. How can we defend the existence of cultural singularities and free ourselves from judging works in the name of those singularities? Multiculturalism brings complex issues to the forefront, and an exhibition is a space where these issues converge without necessarily being resolved. Handcrafted materials, textiles, ceramics, and other handmade objects dominate, as do installations linked to manual practices and ecological works reflecting on the relationship between humans, plants, and animals. Visitors are greeted by an installation by Otobong Nkanga at the entrance to the Central Pavilion. This piece serves as a symbolic, conceptual gateway, offering a vision of matter that is both ecological and postcolonial.

Otobong Nkanga. Photography Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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The exhibition features a variety of pieces, including a monumental ceremonial costume created by Demond Melancon. Characteristic of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indians, this feathered ensemble is adorned with historical scenes. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ installation, composed of large pictorial and photographic panels, watercolors, and floral resin sculptures, draws a connection between Kouoh and Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison. There is also work by Kader Attia addressing the theme of reparations, as well as a piece by Wangechi Mutu. It is a sort of “cosmic womb” that places an alternative feminine cosmology at the center of her work. Additionally, Beverly Buchanan presents “shacks” and micro-architectures. These works explore infrastructural and racial memory and are linked to the southern United States. These are just a few examples of the many that could be cited.

Wangechi Mutu. Photography Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Slowness, Reflection and the Meaning of the Exhibition

“Can an exhibition on the scale of the International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia offer a place to rest your body, as well as refuse the encyclopedic impulse to compulsively see and name?”  If speed truly defines our contemporary world—if everything must be rapidly created and discarded, and the production, consumption, and destruction of anything must occur immediately—then this exhibition aims to encourage the opposite. It invites us to rest, slow down, breathe deeply, and listen in order to tune into the changes around and within us. This is the ambitious curatorial project. Is it possible? I don't know. But as I finish this piece, I’m on my way to Venice again. As José Saramago writes in his book Journey to Portugal: “The end of a trip is just the beginning of another. You have to see what you haven’t seen, see again what you saw, see in spring what you saw in summer, see during the day what you saw at night, with the sun what you saw before when it was raining, see the green crop, the ripe fruit, the stone that had changed place, the shadow that wasn’t there.” 

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La Biennale di Venezia

61st International Art Exhibition In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh 

Venice (Giardini and Arsenale)

May 9 – November 22, 2026