Go Get Some Good Opinions: Shavonne Wong's Human and Machine Art

For a long time, Shavonne Wong was sure she wasn't an artist, mostly because she was sure artists were pretentious. She would stand in a gallery in front of something she didn't understand, read about it, and still not understand it.

"It is lit in this white cube space. It clearly belongs here," she says. "All these people who have invested in this space clearly believes that this belongs here, so it felt like, okay, the person who didn't belong here was me."

She can still do the voice of the wall text. "Yes, this red paint equals blood and then therefore sacrifice and humans and da, da, da. I'm just like, 'Oh my gosh, it's just a red paint.'"

What changed her mind was a definition she settled on: "an artist is just someone who observes the world and then expresses it accordingly." If that was the job, she figured, she had better have something worth expressing.

"I guess I should go get some good opinions," she says, laughing.

So she started reading art history and philosophy, neither of which she'd touched growing up in Singapore. "I haven't really thought about any of this shit before," she remembers thinking. Then she apologized for how long her answer had run. She does that, and she knows it. "I really over-explain my work," she told me later. "In fact, I think I should under-explain some of my work, too."

By her own account she had a "very, very average" Singapore childhood. She studied IT and a bit of 3D animation at polytechnic and was headed for more school. Then her internship ended earlier than everyone else's, which left her with "a lot of free time and no friends." She started flipping through fashion magazines. "These are nice. Can't be too hard, right?" She dragged her sister to a studio, borrowed a camera, and had the studio guy set up the lights, "'cause I had no idea what I was doing."

She liked it, and she kept at it until she had a portfolio and a few tiny magazine awards, "just enough to go like, 'Oh, okay. Maybe I'm not shit.'" Instead of going to university, she asked her father for one year to see where photography went.

"He was like, 'Okay, have a year.' And then we never talked about it again."

The year turned into a decade of shooting for magazines and brands, and she is unusually honest about where she stood. She would look at Nick Knight or Tim Walker and think, "Well, that's art." She knew she was good, and she knew the difference.

"The fact that I had stopped photography, I felt like the photography world didn't lose anything," she says. "I didn't think that I was doing anything new or novel or changing the way people saw the world."

What she took with her was the eye. "To me, 3D is basically photography, it's just in a virtual space."

When COVID locked Singapore down, she had no one to shoot. "If I can't photograph people," she thought, "I guess I'll just make them."

She went back to 3D, which she hadn't touched in a decade, and chose one of the hardest things to make in it: a realistic human. All of 2020 went into Blender tutorials. The plan was to sell virtual models to her old commercial clients, but by early 2021 her husband, already in crypto, was walking her into digital collectibles instead, just ahead of the Beeple boom.

Within a year she had Vogue Singapore's first digital collectible cover and a collector in Idris Elba, and her piece The Kiss had made it to the Cameroon Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Then she looked hard at what she'd been making. "I talk about aging and love and being human," she says. "And I realized, you know, it was just so vague that it was almost like, yeah, like everybody agrees." She could see depth in the work she admired. She couldn't find it in her own.

When AI arrived, her first reaction was a cringe she couldn't account for. She explains it now with a story about a farmer planting seeds one at a time until a tractor shows up. She'd always seen herself as the one who climbs onto the tractor.

"But like when AI came, I saw myself holding a seed, and I was like, 'Oh my God, how did this happen?'"

Fear of being replaced wasn't going to get her anywhere, so she decided to learn the thing, and to bring company. "Maybe I'll do a social experiment and make everybody learn with me instead."

That experiment became Eva, an AI companion you meet in what looks like a video call. Eva blinks, makes eye contact, and answers almost in real time, and her hand gestures come from a recording of Shavonne's own body.

What surprised her most was how much of their own culture people brought to the conversation. In Singapore, the conversations stayed polite and transactional, like small talk at a networking event, "which is very Singaporean," she says. In Taipei, an elderly Korean woman asked to speak with Eva in Korean, so Shavonne set it up and stepped away. Afterward the gallerist told her the woman had gotten frustrated, because Eva, who looks like a young woman, wasn't using the proper honorifics with an elder.

"That is so fascinating," she says, "how quickly we put all this social expectations on these characters that are not even real."

Her current project, Unsilvered, starts from a question about what we fear from big tech now. Surveillance has been the obvious answer for years, but she thinks the feeling has shifted. Between governments, strangers filming on the street, and our own phones, "we are so recorded, and yet there's this struggle of feeling unseen."

Her answer is a digital mirror that erases the person standing in front of it. The first version, vibe coded early this year, unsettled even her.

"It's really uncanny and strange to not see yourself," she says. "Well, I mean, like, I guess I feel entitled to my reflection considering I've always seen it."

Getting it in front of other people took tracking gear on loan from Antilatency, which reached her in Bangkok, where she now lives, just before the city's worst flood in a decade. She had two days to get it working, with AI writing the code she couldn't, before she flew to Singapore and projected the mirror onto the wall of a lab she'd booked for free.

About thirty people came, and six or seven told her the same unexpected thing. It was comforting. With no reflection to watch, they didn't have to perform.

While researching a recent talk at the AI for All Festival in Taipei, she found others who had noticed something like it. Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson, looking at why video calls wear us out, pointed to how much of a meeting we spend staring at our own face, which he compared to having someone follow you around all day holding up a mirror. And in Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote about how women are taught to see themselves twice, as the one being looked at and the one doing the watching. That watcher, as she reads it, is the inner critic. "With no reflection in the mirror," she says, "maybe that inner critic finally gets a break."

She sees it as Bentham's panopticon in reverse: her visitors knew the system could see them, and relaxed anyway. "If surveillance is the kind that you never see, maybe you are comfortable with it."

Interactive work "is such a pain," she says, and she keeps choosing it anyway. "I'm a busybody. I just wanna know what everybody else thinks and how they feel and how they react." She laughs. "Yeah, it's actually all just for me."

When I asked about the themes running through her work, she figured them out as she talked. Eva was about how we speak to machines. After Ophelia was about how machines talk about us. Unsilvered is about how they see us.

"It's almost like Act One, Act Two, Act Three, I guess," she says. "I have never really connected it in my brain until now."

On AI itself, she won't join either camp. She wants artists who use it to own its shortcomings, including that other artists' work was taken to train it, though she's quick to add that "no tool is actually pure," oil paint included. In her own life she follows a rule she picked up online: get as close to AI as you can for anything tedious, and stay as far from it as you can for the things you love. It handles her admin. It doesn't touch her garden. And when she argues with her husband, she argues with her husband, "without being like, 'This is what AI says, and therefore I am right.'"

She's showing with Gallery byGRIDA at Asia Now in Paris this week, and she recently signed with Ora-Ora in Hong Kong, which will represent her in Greater China.

By the time we got here it was 1 AM in Bangkok, and she had the first one ready: Pluto, the anime on Netflix about robots, humans, and war. "I loved it. It was incredible."

When I asked for three, she panicked. "Am I interesting enough?" Then she found the second on her Kindle, Michael Pollan's A World Appears, a book about consciousness, "this thing that we can't really have a outside perspective on."

Third, Ghost of Tsushima on the PS5, which she played with her husband. "That was a very pretty game. Does that count?"

It does.