Paradoxically, as the son of a distinguished traditional Chinese painter, Chen has a close affinity to the continuity of Chinese visual culture, although he is further removed from it in terms of his preferred media. In a highly original way, he adhered to the traditional Chinese approach of learning by copying and imitation by feeding images of traditional Shan Shui (Chinese landscape) paintings into his algorithms and repeating this process with different parameters. He stated that “I convert the brushwork to create new arrangements of pixels and color information based upon the original Shan Shui paintings. My working tools are my algorithms, which use computational formulae to reconstruct the original tableaux in order to spawn new ones. My digital methodologies provide me working techniques of universalism, repetition, randomness and effortless-action”.