The Inscriptive Practices MSA Drawing Prize 2025 winner is… De Lan!
Congratulations to da lan for his outstanding drawing Symbiotic Future — a compelling vision where architectural drawing becomes both speculative fiction and process in motion.
De Lan’s work demonstrates a highly refined allegorical language, employing a hybrid drawing code that weaves freehand graphite, collage, and technical compositing into a dense visual narrative of co-evolution between humans and AI.
What sets this piece apart is not just its technical precision, but its conceptual mastery: through manipulated scales, distorted perspectives, and inserted gestures—both human and mechanical—the drawing performs the very symbiotic condition it depicts. Floating hands and machine arms negotiate agency; sectional cuts, fragmented perspectives, and panoramic distortions construct a spherical, vessel-like world in continuous becoming.
Symbiotic Future resists singular readings. Instead, it proposes drawing as an open system: layered, iterative, performative—where erasures, overlaps, and process marks reveal an architecture always in flux.
An extraordinary testament to drawing as a site of both invention and inquiry.
