CNN
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Bianca Tse is one of a growing number of artists embracing AI. “It shortened the path between my ideas and my visions,” said the 43-year-old, sitting in front of “Breathing Room,” a picture recently exhibited at Hong Kong’s Blue Lotus Gallery.
In it, three Chinese men appear to be sitting comfortably, if precariously, on stools atop a narrow tower of abandoned apartments.
This photograph could not exist in real life, she said, but it captures the atmosphere of the city’s cramped living conditions and a distinct “flavor” of Hong Kong.
Tse’s work is part fantasy – AI-generated – and part historical reference, drawing on his own childhood memories and the history of Hong Kong’s working class. Many of his images take place in an exaggerated version of Kowloon Walled City, a former Qing dynasty fortress that became the most densely populated place on Earth. Refugees fleeing mainland China during the Chinese Civil War flocked to Hong Kong, then under British rule, and took up residence in the enclave.
It was demolished in the 1990s but still remains in the memory of Hong Kong residents.
Although she has never visited the walled city, Tse is fascinated by its history and sees it as representative of a culturally and architecturally disappearing Hong Kong amid ongoing development and gentrification.
Through interviews and rare personal photographs, Tse was able to expand on the memories of some former residents in a new way. She recreated scenes inspired by their lives in the form of short AI-generated videos and images.
The use of artificial intelligence to create art has become increasingly controversial, with artists expressing concern that their work could be used to train AI models without compensation. While Tse agrees, she says AI tools like Midjourney have also allowed her to do work that would otherwise be impossible.
“I don’t need to hire actors, I don’t need to edit all the scenes and, yes, it saves me a lot of time, and especially money, because no one will invest in me to create all these scenes (pieces),” she said.
Technology opened up a new world for Tse, a freelance advertising creative director, who was assignment his AI experiments on Instagram.
The French gallery La Grande Vitrine included its first works in the exhibition “A State of Consciousness” at the Rencontres d’Arles in France in 2023.
And most recently, she was exhibited alongside photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot — two photographers who have documented the Kowloon Walled City — as part of Blue Lotus Gallery “Voices of The Walls”, an exhibition on the informal settlement, where around 33,000 people lived in the space of one block.
Tse’s sense of surrealism is rooted in reality. In her broader depictions of Hong Kong, she focuses on details such as the particular way paint is peeling, concrete walls are staining, and corrugated iron roofing is rusting. These textures are generally not noticed and can be overshadowed in the dystopian and cyberpunk depictions of the city found in video games such as “Stray” and films like “Batman Begins.”
The people in his images also look familiar. They include muscular bamboo scaffold builders, a woman in a quintessential Hong Kong hair salon with a mountain of metal rollers in her hair, and the aforementioned men in rumpled shirts, sitting hunched over slender-legged stools .
A recurring theme that Tse explores is how chaos and poverty coexist with happiness and hope.
“Imaginary Friends” shows a little girl at a market surrounded by trash bags turned into stuffed animals, and is actually based on her own childhood memories of waiting for her mother in the rain outside the frozen meat store where she worked .
“I was living in temporary accommodation – a two-story temporary tin house in Fanling with two bunk beds. I think (it was) less than 100 square feet,” she recalled.
“I only realized I was poor when I grew up,” she added. “I had a really happy childhood, perhaps because of the lack of parental supervision. Since my parents both went to work, I moved around freely, especially after school. »
By working with generative AI software, Tse has learned not to worry about human artists becoming obsolete.
“I think if everyone tried to use AI, they would know that the role of the artist or designer cannot be replaced,” she said. Inviting with a single word can be easy, she explained, but “if you really want to create something close to your vision or something meaningful, it’s actually very difficult.”
To illustrate her point, Tse presents a series of images of failed prompts she created in Midjourney: a contact sheet of Asian men, women and children with a pile of noodles for hair, positioned from comical manner and more like a sloppy Photoshop job than the surreal and refined artwork in his portfolio.
To alleviate the uncanny valley effect – the eerie feeling people get when confronted with something artificial but almost human – Tse does a lot of post-production work.
“I don’t like generating perfect humans. I like someone who is more like everyday life,” Tse said.
This was one of the challenges she faced when collaborating with Girard to create an “escaping photo.”
In the late 1980s, Girard, who was photographing Kowloon Walled City, saw a Cathay Pacific flight attendant get out of a taxi and enter the city, pulling her luggage behind her. Her elegance and composure stood in stark contrast to the gritty surroundings, but he lost her in the maze of alleys before he could take a photo.
Although he waited, hoping to see her again, he never did.
“I didn’t understand it and thought (the image) was gone forever,” he said.
But with the photographer’s blessing, Tse fed her photographs and a series of prompts into Midjourney, going through several thousand versions, she said, to make the woman and the photograph look real.
Girard said he was interested in collaborating because Tse’s work is “so different” from his own. “I was curious where she would take him.
“What won me over was that she (Tse) asked permission directly,” he added in a telephone interview. “Because so many people steal it and you find out later and then you try to deal with it. She was very correct and direct.
The result was “very close” to how Girard remembers it.
“It was both a little disorienting but also satisfying to ask someone else to get a sense of what was going on in your own head.”
