GENERATIONS
A five-part sequence of pieces going back through time exploring my Chinese lineage, ancestors, history, memory, remembrance, and loss.
Exhibited in AltSalt’s ALTERNATIVE WORLDS collection.
It begins in the present day with me, as one piece in a portrait series spanning three generations of women in my family.
1: 阿妹 Me, 2020
2: 媽媽 Mother, 1994
3: 老娘 Grandmother, 在我來這個地球之前 Before I Even Was On This Earth
阿妹 Me, 2020
媽媽 Mother, 1994
老娘 Grandmother, 在我來這個地球之前 Before I Even Was On This Earth
4: 四十九天 49 Days
When we arrive at my grandmother, we see her recent journey to the afterlife in the video piece 49 Days.
5: 之前的時間 The Time Before—
The last piece in the series, is a generation from a neural network of a Chinese papercut, represents the imperfection of memory & dissolution of generational history, as time inexorably marches on. I hand-embroidered the AI-generated design to translate the digital and ephemeral back to the physical, tactile world.
My hand-embroidered real-world rendering of the AI-generated design.
The Time Before—, generated by a neural network.
I've been thinking about memory, history that is relayed and recounted by family members through the foggy lens peering through generations past. And why I use AI in my work... As an artist using AI, you experience an extreme loss of control when you put several hundred ""representative"" images of a subject or theme into a neural network.
The process often goes like: You put in what fragments of an idea or theme you can scrape together, something unexpected always comes out of the machine, and you try to piece it all together. Sometimes it makes sense, often it doesn't.
It's a similar feeling to when you're grasping for a stable story about generations past, and you're left with a feeling of loss and unrecoverable truth.