The Portrait is an ongoing project, inspired by the trip to Kyoto. I encountered a cultural ambiguity between tradition and modernity, there showed an abstracted paradoxical landscape. And at the current stage, in response, I collaborated with AI, feeding it with my texts, drawings and photos made during the trip to generate two sets of 84 images as below.

The generation process was a negotiation between human and non-human agency that AI acted as a subjective collaborator, interacting with me back and forth. The process was not about how I controlled AI, but to consider more about how to reinterpret the relationship between tradition and modernity through a dialogue between human perception and algorithmic logic.

In the future, the images plan to be transformed into tangible ‘healingware’ in furniture and lighting objects, pushing personal reinterpretation into speculative collective reimagination, building up a ‘future archaeological refuge’ that offers spiritual protection from the psychological crises of digital alienation.