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. 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 Tse’s work is part fantasy — generated from AI — and part historical reference, drawing from her own childhood memories and the history of Hong Kong’s working class. The Kowloon Walled City was “not a monstrosity of concrete and steel,” Tse said, but rather “a complex organism woven with resilient human narratives.” Bianca Tse/Midjourney 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. 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.