The artist creating mind-bending images of an alternate Hong Kong through AI

(CNN) — Bianca Tse is among a growing number of artists embracing AI. “It’s shortened the path between my ideas and my visions,” said the 43-year-old, sitting in front of “Breathing Room,” a photo recently showcased at the Blue Lotus Gallery in Hong Kong.

In it, three Chinese men appear to sit comfortably, albeit precariously, on stools atop a narrow tower of derelict flats.

This photograph could not exist in real life, she said, but it captures the feel of the city’s cramped living conditions, and a distinct Hong Kong “flavor.”

Tse’s work is part fantasy — generated from AI — and part historical reference, drawing from her own childhood memories and the history of Hong Kong’s working class. Many of her images are set in an AI-exaggerated version of the Kowloon Walled City — a former Qing dynasty fortress that became the most densely populated place on Earth. Refugees fleeing from mainland China during the Chinese civil war, flooded into then-British ruled Hong Kong and had made the enclave their home.

It was demolished in the 1990s but still looms large in the memories of Hong Kong residents.

While she never visited the Walled City, Tse has been fascinated by its history, and sees it as representative of a Hong Kong that is culturally and architecturally disappearing amid ongoing development and gentrification.

Through interviews and rare, personal photographs, Tse has been able to expand on some former residents’ memories in a new way. She has recreated scenes inspired by their lives in the form of short AI-generated videos and pictures.

The role of AI in art

The use of artificial intelligence to create art has become increasingly controversial, with artists expressing concern that their work can be used to train AI models without compensation. While Tse agrees, she said AI tools like Midjourney have also allowed her to make works that would be otherwise impossible.

“I don’t need to hire actors, I don’t need to set up all the scenes, and, yeah, it saves a lot of time, and mainly money, because nobody is going to invest in me to create all of these (pieces),” she said.

The technology has opened up a new world for Tse, a freelance advertising creative director, who has been posting her AI experiments on Instagram.

The French gallery La Grande Vitrine included her early work in the Rencontres d’Arles exhibition “A State of Consciousness” in France in 2023.

And more recently, she’s shown alongside photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot — two photographers who famously documented the Kowloon Walled City — as part of Blue Lotus Gallery’s “Voices of The Walls,” exhibition about the informal settlement, where an estimated 33,000 people lived within the space of one city block.

Tse’s sense of surrealism is grounded in reality. In her broader depictions of Hong Kong, she focuses on details such as the particular way the paint peels, the concrete walls stain and corrugated metal roofing rusts. These textures might not typically get noticed, and can be overshadowed in the dystopic, cyberpunk depictions of the city found in video games such as “Stray” and movies like “Batman Begins.”

The people in her images also feel familiar. They include muscular bamboo-scaffolding builders, a woman in a quintessential Hong Kong barbershop with a mountain of metal rollers in her hair, and the aforementioned men in wrinkled shirts sitting hunched on thin-legged stools.

One recurring theme Tse explores is how chaos and poverty exists right alongside happiness and hope.

“Imaginary Friends” shows a little girl in a market surrounded by trash bags transformed into stuffed animals, and is actually based on her own childhood memories of waiting for her mother in the rain outside the frozen meat shop where she worked.

“I was living in temporary housing — a metal sheet temporary home with two floors, in Fanling, with two bunk beds. I think (it was) under 100 square feet,” she recalled.

“I only realized I was poor when I grew up,” she added. “I had a really happy childhood, maybe because of the lack of parental guidance. Because my parents both went to work, I just go about freely, especially after school.”

An untaken photo

By working with generative AI software, Tse has learned not to fear human artists becoming obsolete.

“I think if everyone tried to use AI, they’d know that the role of the artist or designer cannot be replaced,” she said. Prompting with a single word might be easy, she explained, but “if you really want to create something close to your vision or something meaningful, it is actually very hard.”

To illustrate her point, Tse pulls up a string 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, comically positioned and that look more like a slapdash Photoshop job than the surreal, polished works of art in her portfolio.

To lessen the uncanny valley effect — the eerie sensation people feel when faced with something artificial but nearly human — Tse does a great deal of post-production work.

“I don’t like generating perfect-looking humans. I like someone who looks more like daily life,” Tse said.

This was one of the challenges she faced when she collaborated with Girard, on creating a “photo that got away.”

In the late 1980s, Girard, who had been photographing the Kowloon Walled City, had seen a Cathay Pacific flight attendant get out of a cab and walk into the City, pulling her luggage behind her. Her elegance and poise were a stark contrast to the gritty surroundings, but he lost her in the maze of alleys before he was able to take a shot.

Though he waited around, hoping to see her again, he never did.

“I didn’t get it, and I thought (the image) was gone forever,” he said.

But with the photographer’s blessing, Tse fed his 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 to collaborate because Tse’s work is “such a departure” from his own. “I was curious where she would take it.

“What won me over was that she (Tse) asked, straight up, for permission,” he added in a phone interview. “Because so many people just steal it and you discover it later and then go about trying to deal with that. She was very correct and straight out.”

The outcome was “very close” to the way Girard remembers it.

“It felt somehow both a little disorienting but also satisfying, to have someone else make a picture of what was going on inside your own head.”

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