Light — or Its Absence？
A Warning from the Silicon Age
Dr
Jeannie Yi, New York
When God created the world, His first
command was not form, not order, and not
intelligence. It was a single sentence:
Let there be light.
That sentence established a hierarchy
that cannot be reversed: light before
systems, meaning before structure, soul
before intelligence.
“Let there be light” were the first
words I heard in my first class in 1985,
when I arrived in the United States to
study comparative literature at
Washington University in St. Louis.
And the second sentence is “God created
man in His own image.” For over two
thousand years, its meaning has remained
steady: God created human beings in His
likeness, placed them in Eden, and gave
them everything—except one prohibition.
“Don’t eat that apple”. To exchange for
the free will. They disobeyed. Adam and
Eve ate the forbidden fruit and were
cast out of Eden. This is the original
sin.
In Paradise Lost, Milton describes this
moment as humanity’s first great
misdirection: love between humans
overtook love for God. The question of
the center shifted. Who stands at the
center of the world
—God or Man?
Humanity placed itself at the center.
On the last day of December 2025, at a
friend’s home in New York, I saw a
painting by Xiao Wei or Yo-yo. The shock
was immediate!
It was a black, torn world without
light. At the top: distorted faces and
masks, compressed like collective
noise—emotion, fear, memory, history
layered together.
At the center: a rupture, like a black
hole—not an entrance or exit, but a
collapse of meaning, positioned above
the human figure.
Below: a single standing person,
stripped of identity,
neither hero nor victim.
On the ground: debris, broken bodies,
toys, daily objects—civilization
collapsing quietly, not through war, but
through everyday life.
This was not horror. It was decentering.
In all the traditions I was educated
in—Western and Eastern alike—placing the
human at the center meant placing
meaning at the center. But here, the
human stands at the center without
authority. Meaning is scattered.
Interpretation is fragmented. The system
runs on its own. The human creates
nothing. At best, they are only part of
the system.
This painting unsettled me more than the
idea of financial decentralization ever
did.
After decades on Wall Street, I’ve seen
countless financial “innovations.” Most
are variations of the same logic: new
money allowing old money to escape.
Eventually, institutions enter.
Regulation follows—late.
Retail investors disappear.
I belong to the half of the world that
still prefers order. Old structures,
however imperfect, make us feel safe. So
I return to Xiao Wei’s painting with one
essential question: Who is Yo-yo?
Yo-yo is a brilliant painter with focus
on what machine learning and human
learning can do in times of AI Age. The
paintings are not his inventions. They
are the momentum of technology itself.
Over seventeen years, and in150,000
hours, Yo-yo painted 40 thousand
works—evidence, repeated again and
again.
Not conclusions. Warnings.
Why Can—and Why Should—Such Works
Generate Commercial Value?
After many years on Wall Street, I have
distilled two enduring maxims:
Follow the money.
Follow the winner.
Capital always flows toward
profitability—or toward power, whether
that power is moral or immoral. I will
not pursue that debate here.
What concerns me instead is this
question:
Can Xiao Wei’s paintings circulate
without explanation?
And within what value system can they be
understood?
If these works are treated merely as
“alternative aesthetic products”
—sold, tokenized, and circulated as
commodities—then my unease is entirely
justified. Our world does not need more
distortion. It is already distorted
enough: localized wars flare up
constantly, social media overflows with
lies, and the forces of goodness, peace,
and compassion can barely find space to
breathe.
But if these works are clearly
positioned as a civilizational archive,
a moral warning, a record of what
happens when intelligence forgets God,
then profit becomes something else
entirely.
It becomes the price paid to preserve
truth, the cost of saving what people
would rather not look at, but must not
allow to disappear. History has proven
this repeatedly: unsettling art often
gains its value precisely because it
speaks the truth too early.
Xiao Wei does not exist because he is
“right,” but because he is precise.
Using the most advanced silicon-based
technologies and human–machine
collaboration, he has created a
civilizational panorama that even he
himself cannot fully control. He does
not preach. He does not solve problems.
He does not comfort anyone.
His paintings simply stand there,
silently showing us:
What happens when endless innovation
continues,
but meaning no longer asks for
permission?
Human collective memory has always been
willing to pay to see itself after it
has caused harm. Hiroshima is not a
world to celebrate—it is a world to
avoid. Yet it must be remembered. This
is precisely why Xiao Wei and his
paintings must exist.
They must be seen. They must circulate.
They must serve as a warning. And Light
comes before everything.
You may choose not to believe in God,
but you should be deeply afraid of a
world without light. Our world cannot be
dark. We do not possess the kind of eyes
that can find light in total darkness.
As I reach the end of this essay, I
finally understand my own unease. What
troubles me is not only the darkness in
Xiao Wei’s paintings, but the absence of
light as a moral principle within them.
A world without light, without morality,
is not the world we want.
Note:
PCW, President of the International
Institute of Future Arts, revealed to
the author that the Institute is
currently building a platform designed
to integrate Eastern cultural heritage
into the already mature Western
evaluation systems—somewhat akin to a
Moody’s-style rating system, though
applied not to publicly listed companies
but to artists and cultural assets. its
a bridge so confidant connect
East & West value systems.
China has over 400,000 painters today.
As Chinese artists and intangible
cultural heritage seek to “go global”
and tell Chinese stories
internationally, what has long been
missing is a bridge into the Western art
world’s established systems of
evaluation. Once such a system exists,
standards can be formed—and fair pricing
can follow.
President Wang emphasized that culture
itself is neither right nor wrong. The
core issue is that Eastern art, when
entering the Western world, faces a
long-ignored yet persistent obstacle: it
is not rejected, but not truly
understood. Western art systems rely on
structures that can be read, verified,
and cited. The conceptual language of
Eastern art—qi, cultivation, artistic
conception, inner method—does not
directly exist within those frameworks
and is highly subjective. As a result,
Eastern art struggles to enter the core
structures of art history and
contemporary evaluation with scattered
success.
Ultimately, once an already-formed
system is able to recognize it, pricing
and circulation will no longer be
difficult,
said President Wang.
We wish President Wang and his institute
great success in 2026, and hope they
will lead Chinese artists onto the
global stage
—beginning with Xiao Wei or yo-yo!
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