Zhiwan Cheung

"A Matter of Orientation" translates Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism into a new digital reality configured by large language models and gamification of storytelling. Players are immersed in an interactive VR temple that recontextualizes Oriental objects from San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (AAM) into deep-fake videos, image-to-3D models, text-to-image stories and architecture, and generative script writing. In their algorithmic recreation, these historical artifacts amplify the cultural distance already traveled away from their geographic home.

In collaboration with Oksana Kryzhanivska