Life's a many-layered thing

Nie Mu's first solo show Memoire premieres at the Galerie Urs Meile, with a collection of "digital paintings" created over the past three years. What first appears as a series of works portraying abstract images is actually a painstaking compilation of isolated choices from a mass of free hand digital drawings.

"I've added things layer by layer over the course of a year, regardless of whether each had a theme," says Nie.

Employing a method without rules, the artist lays out a loose structure, devoid of direction or approach. After each individual layer of her paintings have been organized and ordered, the final surface is a definitive step surmising hundreds of seemingly random choices made before. "People have their judgments," she says, "but the computer is unsentimental."