![]() ![]() “I want to restore it to the era when it was not so involuted,” she says, using a word that has become popular in recent years to describe the widespread feeling of burnout in China. ![]() “Now is a completely different era, but I kind of want to go back to that era.” In particular, she wanted to re-create what Hangzhou looked like before it became a tech hub and home to multiple Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba, Hikvision, and NetEase. “For our generation, I feel like there’s a massive leap from 1995 to 2023,” says Wang. She used Midjourney to create photos of China in the 1980s and ’90s. Kim Wang, a 28-year-old UI designer and photographer in Hangzhou, was inspired by Beijing Silvermine, a project by the French artist Thomas Sauvin, who rescued 850,000 discarded color negatives, dating from around 1985, from a recycling factory in Beijing. Diaspora youth in the West have been forming communities on Instagram where they crowdsource and curate historical photos in order to rebuild memories free from a Western framing. Some artists working with AI are inspired by the discovery of real photos. Each time, he writes the prompts in Chinese, uses machine translation tools to convert them to English, feeds them into Midjourney, and spends about 20 minutes tweaking them to get the ideal result. Now, Zhang pays more than $200 a year for Midjourney, and uses it to generate new retro photographs with different themes: rural weddings in the ’90s, physical laborers for hire waiting in the market, and Chongqing street fashion. “What the AI generated-the look of resilience in their eyes and the way they are dressed-it looks exactly the same as what I described to it,” he says. When he turned that experience into an image-generating prompt for Midjourney, he was amazed by the results. There were stories in their eyes,” he says. “When I was little, I would often watch them come out of the factory during their break, sit on the ground, smoke a cigarette, and look into the distance. He grew up near the Chongqing Iron and Steel Company, one of the oldest and largest steel factories in China, and remembers watching the workers when he was about seven years old. Zhang, the creator of the AI images above, was born in Chongqing in 1992. ![]()
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