Through Dawn is a generative video installation that centers on the artist’s self-developed AI system “Jiayu*. Trained on the artist’s past digital imagery and sequences, the system provides a distinctive form of machine imagination through which personal identity and memory are reinterpreted. The model learns and inherits the artist’s unique visual language and worldview; however, unlike the artist’s own creative process, the machine builds its own associations and imaginative links within the dataset. Through this process, it remaps a fragment of personal history, one that has been reprocessed and reshaped through the machine's perceptual logic.

During the training process, the artist annotated image sequences and visual elements from her earlier works to build a dataset for the AI’s visual learning. Gradually, the machine learned to construct natural worlds from abstract particles—mountains, streams, forests, grasslands, mushrooms, flowers, birds, and bamboo groves—symbolic motifs that have long formed the visual core of the artist’s practice. Operating through a recursive process of reproduction and reinterpretation, the system generates new works that recontextualize the artist’s creative logic. Each output can evolve into new landscapes in response to user prompts, becoming both an extension and a mirror of the artist’s visual system. It reflects on how the uniqueness and existential significance of art can persist in the age of intelligent systems. Through public interaction with prompt, Jiayu* evolves into a generative network of collective memory, where human input and machine perception continuously reshape one another.

By introducing AI into the reproduction and recreation of artworks, we argue that a new concept of “Aura” has emerged today—one that arises from the context and participation of artificial intelligence. The work thus redefines the boundary of artistic authorship, proposing that the “aura” in the era of technological art may not disappear through replication, but instead re-emerge through the machine’s reinterpretation of human memory and identity.

*The model is also available online, inviting the public to explore and interact by sharing collective memories, reimagining the uniqueness and spirit of art in the digital age.

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