Zhanpei Fang
Stanford Bunny (2026)
I am concerned with operational images (after Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen, Jussi Parikka); which have emerged from the imbroglio of military, industrial, and scientific-academic power; of which satellite images are one example, and computer-vision depth maps and point clouds are another. In our world, viewing is not only undertaken by prosthetic sensors, but interpreted by algorithms; these operational images structure the world and our own seeing, being the currency of exchange within my chosen scientific discipline.
These are the subjects of recent paintings of ‘standard test objects’, including the Stanford Bunny, a 3D model produced at Stanford University in 1994 by 3D scanning a ceramic figurine of a rabbit, which is still commonly used to demonstrate computer-graphics and signal processing algorithms. The painting additionally features imagery from a 3D scanning dataset of an office interior produced using a Kinect sensor by the Technical University of Munich. I am interested in these objects’ and images’ formal visual qualities. I am continuing to expand this visual investigation into my own research domain, satellite images, and other scientific imagery (e.g. medical) datasets which are increasingly being operationalized with the help of AI tools. (I also have a paper in the main track of CVPR this year, poster #39657, "PRUE: A Practical Recipe for Field Boundary Segmentation at Scale".)
Zhanpei Fang is a PhD student in AI & geography at Oregon State University, where she applies computer vision to satellite imagery for areas of humanitarian and conflict concern. She is also a classically trained oil painter who previously studied a BA in studio art at Stanford University (where she won the Barbara and Sandy Dornbusch Prize in Painting) and at the Georgetown Atelier in Seattle (where she was supported by the Gage Academy of Art BIPOC Scholarship).
She works across machine learning, remote sensing and critical spatial practice, and occasionally writes essays that critically investigate technology through philosophy, art history and media theory. In her painting practice she is interested in those places where human and machine vision meet. This convergence is core to the problem of painting in the digital age, and she believes that painting and computer vision research have many things to tell each other.