Sheung Yiu - The New Shaman Chased The Old One Out Of Town: On Facial Predictions

MAInD Expanding Talks continues, and for the course Prototyping Spatial Experiences, led by Leonardo Angelucci, we are delighted to welcome a special guest: Sheung Yiu.

Sheung Yiu (born 1991, Hong Kong) is an image-centered artist and researcher, based in Helsinki. He explores visual culture emerging at the intersection of photography and large-scale computation. At the moment, he is looking at the history of face reading and facial recognition to understand how photographs become predictions. His works take the form of photography, video essays, desktop performance, exhibition installations, and artist books. He is a doctoral researcher in photography at Aalto University. He won the C/O Berlin Talent Award in 2025 and was selected as a FOAM Talent in 2024.

In this talk, Sheung Yiu will present his ongoing project, (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face, currently on view at C/O Berlin. Across Eastern and Western cultures, societies have developed ways to predict a person’s character through facial features. In East Asian cultures, the esoteric practice of face-reading promises the power to see into one’s future through facial analysis. In the West, the forgotten pseudo-science of physiognomy, combined with statistics and machine learning, re-enters our modern lives as facial recognition algorithms, perpetuating societal biases and individual prejudices.

During the talk, he will discuss how the project has evolved over the past three years, outlining both the research process and the conceptual framework behind it. He will also reflect on the spatial design of the exhibition and the new works developed to translate the project into an immersive exhibition environment.


📅 February 24th, 2026
🕓 02:00 PM (CET)
📍 Online on Zoom
link: https://supsi.zoom.us/j/67273107594