A New Language of Light, Time, and Memory

EMI KUSANO | GRANT YUN | REUBEN WU | NICEAUNTIES | GENESIS KAI | SHAVONNE WONG

Grand Palais, Paris | 13–16 November 2025 CURATED BY GRIDA

  • This exhibition does not mark the end of photography—it considers how it persists under transformed conditions. Images now circulate across screens and networks, shaped by algorithmic flows. These six artists do not reject photography—they rewrite it in a new order, where the photographic still resonates.

    Niceaunties builds Auntieverse, a speculative archive and AI-driven visual world inspired by the Asian “auntie” archetype. Her images blend humor, nostalgia, and digital surrealism to reframe everyday matriarchs as empowered protagonists within future imaginaries. Grant Yun’s minimalist digital landscapes offer meditative spaces through restrained geometry and color, reinterpreting photographic stillness without a camera.

    By retaining photography’s core concerns—composition, stillness, and memory—he demonstrates how digital painting can function as photographic thought and how the language of photography endures despite evolving tools.

  • Niceaunties builds Auntieverse, a speculative archive and AI-driven visual world inspired by the Asian “auntie” archetype. Her images blend humor, nostalgia, and digital surrealism to reframe everyday matriarchs as empowered protagonists within future imaginaries. Grant Yun’s minimalist digital landscapes offer meditative spaces through restrained geometry and color, reinterpreting photographic stillness without a camera.

    By retaining photography’s core concerns—composition, stillness, and memory—he demonstrates how digital painting can function as photographic thought and how the language of photography endures despite evolving tools.

    Reuben Wu’s drone lighting transforms landscapes into theatrical scenes, manipulating light and time to redefine documentary photography. His images stage light rather than merely reflecting it, envisioning landscapes as celestial theaters where luminous memories are encoded in air and time. Together, these three artists rethink the fundamental components of photography—composition, duration, and affect—within digital vocabularies

  • Shavonne Wong, Emi Kusano, and Genesis Kai explore portraiture and identity in digital space. Wong’s hyperreal virtual portraits redefine photography by questioning the future of portraiture when the subject is constructed rather than captured. Her code-born characters challenge realism, creating synthetic presence and sculpted emotion. Kusano collaborates with AI to generate self-portraits that reveal how identity and memory are now co-authored with algorithms and machine perception, exploring the algorithmic fragmentation of selfhood and reframing photography as a dialogue between intention, automation, and data-driven transformation. Genesis Kai, a non-human digital entity, merges traditional visual culture with speculative artificial consciousness to interrogate subjecthood and reality. Digitally reconstructing Joseon-era moon jars, printing them on hanji paper, and simulating memory through cultural code, Kai introduces a non-human perspective into photography—one that proposes rather than documents reality, raising profound questions about machine-made images and their future implications.

  • Niceaunties

    Grand Palais, Paris | 13–16 November 2025

  • Niceaunties at Paris Photo 2025Mirror into Auntieverse.

    At the centre of the presentation stands a 19th-century Napoleon III mirror, transformed into a sculptural screen. Produced in collaboration with Load Gallery, the installation merges antique craftsmanship with contemporary technology, reimagining the mirror as a living digital surface. Equipped with motion capture technology and a concealed display, it reflects the visitor’s body but replaces their face with that of an auntie from the speculative Auntieverse. After a few seconds, the auntie delivers a familiar, blunt greeting, ranging from “Have you eaten?” to “You look so tired!”, reminding visitors how care often hides behind teasing honesty.

    Motion tracking allows up to three figures to interact simultaneously, each auntie following the contours of the viewer’s movement while retaining her own distinct features and expression. Subtitles appear in English and French, bridging humour and cultural nuance.

    The work draws upon art historical precedents from Jan van Eyck to Manet and Asian myths in which mirrors are said to reveal the soul. Here, the mirror becomes a living surface of empathy and critique, transforming a fleeting reflection into a surreal act of recognition. In the Auntieverse, a recurring saying by Niceaunties is that “there is an auntie in all of us,” reflecting the human nature of self-criticism and emotional complexity.

    The mirror also playfully references fairy-tale stories such as the evil queen’s mirror in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Where the queen once demanded, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”, one of Niceaunties’ reflections might instead quip, “You la, you are the fattest of them all!” turning the mythology of vanity into an act of comic self-awareness.

  • About Niceaunties and the Auntieverse

    Niceaunties is a Singaporean artist known for constructing the Auntieverse, an AI-generated narrative world that reimagines the Asian auntie archetype as a positive, visible force of human nature. Her practice blends humour, nostalgia, and digital surrealism to explore themes of ageing, identity, consumer culture, and domestic labour. Through moving image, installation, and speculative storytelling, she builds a living archive that transforms everyday matriarchs into protagonists of cultural and emotional depth.

    Her works have been exhibited internationally and are recognised for merging AI-driven visual systems with intimate, culturally specific narratives that challenge the boundaries between technology, memory, and care.

  • About Artverse

    Founded by Sebastien Borget and Arthur Madrid of The Sandbox and directed by Grida, a first-generation digital/crypto art curator, ArtVerse is a cultural space that celebrates the fusion of digital art and Web3. Located in Paris’s vibrant Marais district, ArtVerse is dedicated to showcasing groundbreaking digital art while fostering connections within the Web3 community. The gallery’s name reflects its mission: combining "art" with "verse" to encompass multiple dimensions of creative expression. ArtVerse presents a diverse array of works that explore and celebrate the relationship between the digital and physical worlds.
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