Zeo Zhang: Emotional Planet at Neo Ippei

In the intimate cultural space of Neo Ippei in Hachinohe, Aomori, Los Angeles-based artist Zeo Zhang's residency has culminated in the presentation of Emotional Planet, a participatory installation in which the community becomes the author of a shared emotional landscape. Invited by Mikiko Takasago, researcher and founder of Neo Ippei, Zhang created a work whose final visual form belongs entirely to its participants: every mark, every color, every painted surface was made by a human hand. Emotional Planet unfolds as a process rather than a fixed object. Visitors are invited to type freely into a digital interface, in any language, whatever occupies their thoughts in the moment. The system reads each input and interprets the emotion behind it according to Takasago's taxonomy of 24 emotional archetypes, functioning not as an author but as a translator between language and image. Each participant receives a visual form corresponding to their emotional type and is invited to reshape it through color and surface, making it entirely their own. What the system proposes, the participant transforms. The residency transformed Neo Ippei into a site of communal introspection, where individual contributions accumulated into a shared emotional tapestry. Zhang's installation builds over time, organizing each contribution within a matrix of emotional valence and activation, constructing a collective portrait of the community at a particular moment. A recurring motif emerged across the residency: a pervasive thread of heaviness, of worry and unease quietly articulated by visitors who might otherwise have had no occasion to name it. Whether this reflects the ambient weight of global political and economic uncertainty, or something particular to the psychology of introspection itself, the pattern registers as more than coincidence. The technical infrastructure of the work is designed to stay invisible. The system operates entirely offline, employing Three.js-based visual rendering and local SQLite architecture, free from external network dependencies. The interpretive layer draws on an unaltered, non-specialized large language model, a deliberate choice that foregrounds the aggregate of everyday human expression as the primary driver of emotional reading. The system does not claim objectivity. It reflects back a kind of collective subjectivity, shaped by the same imperfect accumulation of human language that all of us carry. Emotional Planet positions itself within broader discourses on participatory art, affect, and the psychological dimensions of expressive writing, engaging alongside Takasago's research on emotional archetypes and James Pennebaker's scholarship on the processing of inner experience through language. Emotional Planet engages with research on emotional archetypes by Takasago and on expressive writing by James Pennebaker, positioning participatory art within broader conversations about affect and psychological processing. The work reflects Zhang's ongoing exploration of how structural systems can hold space for human expression to accumulate into something shared and collective. Looking forward, Zhang is interested in how the emotional landscape shifts across different cities and cultures, imagining versions of Emotional Planet in other locations as a way to map the particular anxieties and preoccupations of different communities. Her work has been recognized with international awards and exhibited globally, including at the Seoul International Poster Design Triennale and the Harbin International Design Exhibition.