Hannah Yan

Artist

Hannah Yan · hannahyan.com/blog-tot ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/hannah-yan ↗

Practice

Generative art, creative coding, and data visualization shaped through algorithmic systems and visual storytelling

In the set

Totem of Taste ↗ · 128 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Hannah Yan’s practice connects data science, visual communication, and creative coding. A Duke University profile locates her interests at the point where data visualization, science, and art converge, and records her work on interaction design and web application development for the WebGL-based visualization tool Kepler.gl.¹ That background carries into her generative work, where algorithms do more than multiply forms. They organize how an image discloses itself, balancing legible systems with variation, texture, and surprise.

Yan’s account of participating in Genuary in 2021 offers a concise view of this development. Working from daily prompts, she experimented with p5.js and algorithmic painting. Her writing archive also documents sustained investigations of flow fields, waves, visualization, and machine learning interpretation.² The resulting practice is grounded in code, but its visual character depends on a patient search for associations that code alone cannot prescribe.

From trajectory to object

Totem of Taste is the clearest expression of this approach in the AB[500]. Released as a collection of 128 editions, it turns the movement of strange attractors into concentrated, object-like compositions. Millions of points follow deterministic paths, gathering into forms that resemble doughnuts, mochi, monuments, and stacked sculpture. The project’s subject is therefore not food as illustration. It is the conversion of taste, appetite, and recollection into density, contour, color, and glow.

The series depends on a productive contradiction. Its forms can appear coarse, mineral, or archaeological, yet their colors and rounded outlines retain the immediacy of confectionery. This tension makes the title precise: each output behaves like a totem, a compact emblem around which private associations of taste can accumulate. Repetition strengthens that effect. Rings recur across the collection, but changes in layout, palette, scale, and contour prevent them from settling into a single symbol.

Yan’s broader practice supplies an important context for this balance. Published profiles describe a portfolio spanning data visualization, data science, and creative coding, with projects made using Tableau, R, D3.js, Flourish, and p5.js.¹ In Totem of Taste, that translational discipline becomes sensuous rather than explanatory. A mathematical system remains active beneath the surface, but the viewer encounters it as atmosphere and apparent material.

Live on Art Blocks: totem-of-taste-by-hannah-yan ↗

Memory as a generative parameter

The project also invites a distinction between programmed features and experienced meaning. The code can determine point trajectories, dependencies, gradients, and the relative frequency of traits. It cannot determine which flavor, place, or occasion a viewer recalls. Taste enters the work through form, then exceeds the system through memory.

This interest in intimate experience remained visible when Yan participated in Shiseido’s Future Reflections project in 2023. Her contribution, The Transcendence, formed part of a collaboration joining four generative artists with Art Blocks Engine and references to ingredients associated with Shiseido’s skincare line.³ Contemporary reporting identified Yan alongside Jen Stark, Kaoru Tanaka, and Robert Hodgin, and connected the project’s 1,872 works to Shiseido’s founding year.⁴ Yan described her contribution as an exploration of time, transformation, motion within stillness, and the cycle of awakening suggested by growing seeds.³

Totem of Taste remains especially effective because its premise is modest and exact. It does not claim to reproduce taste. Instead, it gives memory a scaffold. Strange attractors supply movement, point fields supply texture, and recurring rings supply recognition. Across 128 editions, the collection stages a sustained encounter between deterministic procedure and the unstable, personal afterlife of sensation.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Hannah Yan links page ↗.