A Collaborative Review of Wenfei Quan’s Contemporary Hominin Through Human–AI Wordplay

Text by Webson Ji, Asian Art Contemporary™

I visited TaThaTa Gallery on September 11, 2026, for the opening of Contemporary Hominin, a solo exhibition by Wenfei Quan, curated by Xiao Liu. Having previously written about an exhibition curated by Xiao, I was interested to see how his curatorial approach would unfold in this show, and how he would bring his perspective into conversation with Wenfei’s practice. I first met Wenfei through Eli Klein Gallery’s Residency-Then-Exhibition Program years ago, and have continued to follow her artistic practice ever since. As an active artist in New York’s Asian diaspora art community, she has developed a practice that examines the relationship between humans, images, and technology. This exhibition offers another perspective on these ongoing concerns.

One of the things I noticed in Contemporary Hominin is how Quan uses small interventions to change the way we read an image. In Mole, she draws a copy of a natural mole on the opposite side of her face, creating a version of herself that follows a more symmetrical arrangement. The lightbox presentation gives this altered portrait a deliberate presence. What might otherwise be an ordinary detail of someone’s appearance becomes a decision about how a face should look. The change is small, but it affects how we understand the image as a representation of a person.

In Familiar Aliens, Quan works with images of her own retinas, using screen printing to present them in a different visual form. Looking at these prints, I found myself paying attention less to the eye as an organ and more to the patterns within the images. Details associated with the body become the starting point for another kind of visual experience. The works also made me consider how much of what we recognize in an image depends on what we already know about its source. Without that context, the same image can be read in very different ways.

These observations led me to think about how images change as they move between different forms and systems. Artificial intelligence offers another example of this process. It draws on material created by people and produces responses that can reorganize or extend what has already been expressed. The result is not independent of its source, but neither is it always a straightforward repetition of it. I began to wonder how this relationship might be explored through the writing of the review itself.

For this article, I decided to work with ChatGPT. I shared images of the artworks and the exhibition statement, then asked it to review the exhibition from the perspective of an art critic. I wanted to see how it would interpret the works using the material I provided, and how its response might relate to my own experience of the exhibition.

I asked ChatGPT: “Here are images of the artworks and the exhibition statement. If you were an art critic, how would you review this exhibition?”

ChatGPT responded:

(AI-generated text — original response reproduced verbatim)

In Contemporary Hominin, Wenfei Quan turns the human body into a starting point for questioning how we see and understand the world. Her silkscreen prints transform retinal scans into images that seem to shift between biological structures and unfamiliar landscapes, making the familiar act of seeing feel strangely uncertain. In the Mole series, faces presented through lightboxes appear both recognizable and artificially constructed, as small changes in symmetry disrupt our sense of individual identity. These works come together in the titular installation, where an AI-generated face becomes both an image to be observed and a surface through which to look. Across the exhibition, Quan suggests that our attempts to reproduce ourselves do not necessarily lead to greater self-understanding. Instead, each act of mirroring introduces new differences, raising questions about what happens when the technologies we create begin to shape how we see ourselves.

Reading this response, I noticed how quickly ChatGPT organized the exhibition into a single argument. It connected the three bodies of work through the relationship between the human body, symmetry, and technology. This gave me a useful overview, but it also made the exhibition feel more unified than my own experience of moving between the individual works. The response was based on the images and statement I supplied, while my reading also came from seeing the works in person and from my familiarity with Wenfei’s practice.

I also found myself responding to the language ChatGPT had generated. Some of its observations gave me a way to organize ideas I had already been considering; others made me look again at what I wanted to say. As I revised the article, the distinction between my initial observations and the ideas introduced by the response became less straightforward. I was no longer simply asking AI to describe an exhibition for me. I was using its interpretation as material for developing my own.

This experience brought me back to the role of repetition in Quan’s work. In Mole, the added mark changes how I read the portrait, even though the face remains recognizable. In Familiar Aliens, the retinal images encourage a different kind of attention from the one we usually give to the eye. In both cases, the source remains present, but the intervention changes what becomes visible and meaningful. My exchange with ChatGPT was not the same process, but it gave me a practical way to consider how an existing image or idea can be reworked through another system.

Working with AI also made me more aware of my own role in shaping the outcome. The response depended on the materials I selected and the question I asked. What I did with that response depended on my own observations, judgment, and decisions about what belonged in the article. At the same time, the language AI produced affected how I organized my thoughts. The exchange was not simply a matter of one side providing information and the other returning an answer. Each stage influenced what came next.

Returning to Quan’s work, I am particularly interested in the way she places the human body at the center of her exploration of technology. Rather than treating the body and technology as separate subjects, she shows how images of ourselves can be altered through the methods we use to reproduce them. The face, the eye, and the AI-generated portrait each offer a different point of entry into this relationship. The works also remind me that seeing an image and understanding it are not the same thing. What we recognize depends partly on the image itself, but also on the systems and assumptions through which we approach it.

Writing this review alongside ChatGPT gave me another way to engage with these concerns. I began with Quan’s exhibition and then encountered an interpretation that changed how I developed my own. That process did not replace my experience of the works; it became part of it. Contemporary Hominin gave me a reason to examine how we reproduce images of ourselves, while the writing experiment made me more attentive to how those images and ideas can return to us in altered forms. For me, the value of Quan’s exhibition lies in the way it brings these questions back to our own acts of seeing, making, and understanding.

(Photo courtesy of the artist and TaThaTa Gallery)