Dissolving a City’s Day Into Color: Chih-Yu Chen’s DIFFUSE at Taipei Lumitree

Section 2 of Dunhua South Road, after dark. At the point where the green shade of the street-tree arcade breaks off, a column of light stands and shifts without pause — from the pale colours of morning mist, to the high-saturation colours of the city's neon, to the deep gold of a temple lamp. Several vertical LED surfaces each glow at a slightly different speed and in a slightly different colour, and the column as a whole breathes as a single current of colour. In July 2026, what plays on this light tree at Taipei Lumitree (敦南之森, the Dunnan Forest) is DIFFUSE, a generative work by the Taiwanese artist Chih-Yu Chen (陳致瑜).

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An Artist Who Has Written Inside the Screen

Chih-Yu Chen is a Taipei-based, web-native generative artist whose principal materials are HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The currents of colour and form produced by computational algorithms, within the screen of the browser, have been the centre of this artist's practice. In 2024 Chen showed ReAlms Converging — a work that recomposes an Eastern aesthetic by combining deliberately designed generative rules with AI guidance — at dialog() — Asian Generative Art Exhibition, the Asian generative art exhibition that toured Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Beijing.

Until now this practice has been, in essence, self-contained "inside a flat screen." A monitor, a projection, a web browser — screens that a viewer faces alone, from relatively close range. What makes DIFFUSE interesting is that colour writing in web-native code has been carried out onto a non-planar, large-format, outdoor LED standing in the street. An algorithm that used to run inside a browser becomes, on a 10-metre column among the street trees, colour at a scale that envelops the field of view of a passer-by. An artist who has written inside the screen goes out into the urban space beyond it — this work is one instance of that crossing.

DIFFUSE — Reducing a City's Day to Colour

The subject of DIFFUSE is the time of one day in the city of Taipei. The artist cuts the everyday cycle of Taipei into three temporal sections: the subdued natural colours carried by the morning mist over Yangmingshan; the vivid neon that runs through the daytime of the city centre; and the deep gold given off by the night sky over Xiangshan and the lanterns of Longshan Temple. Taking these three as points of departure, the golden ratio is used to distribute the origin of each layer's colour, breaking the memory of the city's hours down into flowing data.

The generated imagery is assigned three palettes — dawn, day and dusk — which circulate in turn between the rings of colour that make up the column. The quiet of the mountain forest, the clamour of the street and the warmth of the temple's fire permeate one another and resonate within a mathematical rhythm. A day that ought to lay itself out in sequence flows, on the light tree, simultaneously and in overlay. Morning, noon and night run in parallel on separate LED surfaces at the same instant.

With code as ink and time as canvas, color temperature drifts here, without end.

— Taipei Lumitree(作家ステートメント)source

What makes the work hold together is the set of three LED surfaces of differing scale that the light tree carries. Surfaces of different sizes each take charge of their own frequency of colour, and the difference in their dimensions produces a fine visual displacement. The viewer is prompted to find detail within the overall surge of colour and, conversely, to sense the rhythm of the whole within the detail. Come closer and the colour of each individual panel can be read; step back and the column appears as a single living organism of colour. The same algorithm shows a different aspect according to the distance from which it is seen.

The Light Tree Among the Street Trees as Vessel

Taipei Lumitree itself, the setting for DIFFUSE, has already been followed in detail by this journal in a separate piece. On Section 2 of Dunhua South Road in Taipei's Da'an District, on the plaza of the Baohong Dunnan commercial building, a 10-metre 360-degree LED column and a transparent LED wall have stood since the autumn of 2024. Tiger Party, the New York firm that has run large outdoor media in Times Square, handles the design and operation, and from the moment it opened this has been permanent signage programmed as a place for showing art — Art First. Beginning with LUMi, the character that casts the Taiwanese leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) in the lead role, the venue has consistently made art rather than advertising the subject of its screens.

Onto this Art First vessel, a generative work by a single artist such as DIFFUSE is loaded as a monthly slot. For the whole of July, every day from eight in the morning until half past eight at night, the light tree goes on repeating the colours of a day in Taipei. The permanence of the light tree as an apparatus, a vessel, and the work of one artist kindled upon it for a fixed season — the two belong to separate lineages, and yet on this plaza they overlap for a time. An artificial tree, planted as one more among the green shade of the street trees, houses for the month of July the hours of a city that a single artist has taken apart.

Time Written in Code, Kindled in the Street

Attempts to bring generative imagery onto large LED screens in the street are appearing across East Asia. The enormous wave that fills the wall at COEX in Seoul, or the work of Raven Kwok, who has translated the methods of creative coding onto the city's screens — the number of artists offering code-generated images to urban screens is growing. Within that lineage, DIFFUSE can be placed as one step out towards a large LED in the street, taken by an artist whose work had been self-contained on the small screen of a web browser.

What is at work here is the relation between ma — the interval — and tenkei, the small figure that animates a landscape. A day in Taipei is by nature continuous time, running in one direction from morning to night. DIFFUSE cuts that continuity into three sections, and by redistributing the origins of colour according to the golden ratio it makes an artificial blank within time — room for editing. Into that blank it kindles a current of colour in which morning, noon and night run side by side at once. The self-evident order of chronological sequence is once "opened," and time reconstituted in mathematical terms is "kindled" in its place. The light tree standing among the street trees becomes, in this way, a single tenkei into which a day in Taipei has been folded.

Colour written in code goes on being generated inside the browser without end, as countless variations. Transferred to an LED in the street, it meets the glances of those passing by, the green of the street trees and the memory of a temple lamp. A computation inside a screen rises up as one point within the scenery of a city — quietly, in the middle of a street-tree arcade in Taipei, DIFFUSE shows what happens when web-native generative art crosses over onto the screens of public space.

Sources

1. fig.001Chih-Yu Chen — DIFFUSE — Taipei Lumitree (official Instagram)
2. fig.002台北新地標來了！Taipei Lumitree亮點快看 — 數位時代 BusinessNext(YouTube)
3. [3]Taipei Lumitree — Official Site
4. [4]Chih-Yu Chen(@____cychen)— Instagram
5. [5]Chih-Yu Chen — dialog() Asian Generative Art Exhibition, artist profile
6. [6]A Light Tree Among the Street Trees — Taipei Lumitree (previously in this journal)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Taipei Lumitree (designed, operated and programmed by NYC-based Tiger Party); DIFFUSE runs as one of the venue’s programmed artist slots

LOCATION

Taipei

MODEL

Corporate programme — A slot within the venue’s permanent art programming (its “Art First” policy); a single artist’s work shown as the July 2026 monthly programme

CADENCE

From 1 to 31 July 2026, looping daily 08:00–20:30

SPEC

Shown across three LED surfaces of differing scale (the 10 m, 360-degree LED column and the transparent LED wall); venue setup is P2.9, 254 m² of LED, 8K

SINCE

2026-07

STATUS

Scheduled to end — Scheduled to end on 31 July 2026

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