Wenfei Quan makes an AI face into a way of looking

Wenfei Quan’s Contemporary Hominin put an AI face on transparent film in front of a video of two rotating globes. Looking towards its eyes meant looking through the portrait to another image. The synthetic person became part of an apparatus for seeing.[1]

The New York exhibition ran at TaThaTa from 11 September to 10 October 2026. Columbia’s account describes the contemporary human, confronting technologies whose supporting systems remain difficult to understand, as the hominin of the title.[1][3]

Quan reached similar strangeness through physical alterations. In Mole, makeup duplicated each sitter’s natural facial marks on the opposite side. Familiar Aliens began with photographs of her own retinas, transformed through mirroring and printmaking. The body supplied material that could look unfamiliar without being generated.[1]

Writing in IMPULSE after the exhibition, critic Zoe Zheng connected the small registration shifts in the prints with traces of their maker’s hand. Her reading gives the AI portrait a useful context: the show’s altered faces also emerged from makeup, repetition and the physical act of printing.[2]

That comparison shifts attention from whether an image looks human to how a human image is constructed. The machine-made face is one intervention among several; its transparency turns apparent recognition into a literal act of looking beyond it.[1][2]

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