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AI transforms Hong Kong’s Golden Age cinema in artist’s massive facade installation
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Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s latest commission for Hong Kong’s M+ museum represents a fascinating convergence of cutting-edge AI technology with nostalgic cinema. His work “Night Charades” transforms the museum’s massive 110-metre facade into a canvas for reimagined scenes from Hong Kong’s cinematic Golden Age, using artificial intelligence to create multiple versions of iconic moments from films by directors like John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. This project exemplifies how AI tools can be harnessed to explore cultural heritage while simultaneously creating something distinctly contemporary.

The big picture: Ho’s installation continues his artistic approach of using the past to explore the future, with AI technology creating multiple versions of classic Hong Kong cinema scenes.

  • The commission, supported by M+ museum, Art Basel and UBS, will be displayed from March 22 to June 29, 2025.
  • By leveraging AI to render and re-render imagery, Ho creates what he describes as a “dizzying multiplicity” of variations on the original scenes.

Cultural context: Ho’s personal connection to Hong Kong cinema stems from his childhood in Singapore, where these films and TV series were enormously influential.

  • The artist acknowledges how this cinema was “formative to his visual world and imagination,” making this project a natural extension of his artistic interests.
  • His fascination with the concept of a “Golden Age” being positioned in the past rather than the future drives the conceptual framework of the installation.

Approach to AI: Ho treats artificial intelligence as a tool with specific capabilities and limitations, focusing on its ability to generate multiple interpretations.

  • Rather than using AI simply for novelty, Ho employs it specifically for its capacity to create numerous renderings of the same cinematic scene.
  • The project deliberately “resists a single narrative or timeline,” embracing the multiplicity that AI generation enables.

Why this matters: Night Charades represents a thoughtful application of AI in art that doesn’t simply showcase the technology but uses it to explore cultural memory and visual history.

  • Ho suggests the work may be perfectly “dated” to our current moment—capturing both our nostalgia for past cultural touchstones and our contemporary fascination with AI’s creative capabilities.
  • The installation demonstrates how AI can be used not just to create new imagery but to reexamine and recontextualize existing cultural artifacts.
Ho Tzu Nyen on how AI leads to the cinematic past

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