CARRIE CHEN

Generazione Critica: Your artistic practice spans CGI animation, real-time interactivity, game engine simulation, and installation. How did your approach to digital media evolve over time, and what are the key themes that drive your research?

Carrie Chen: I became interested in CGI and simulation almost by accident around 2018. My partner, working in interior design at the time, was building 3D mockups and previewing them in VR. Seeing that process was a turning point—it revealed digital mediums as something more than just a tool for visualization, but a quite magical way to create experiences and explore ideas like presence. As I was finishing up my degree in Art History and Psychology, I started exploring 3D software myself, and something clicked. My work began to take shape and I finally found the type of artistic medium I was looking for, where I could explore all the ideas I had about memory, time, representation, the archive, and hybridity… Digital mediums often feel fleeting, which is an element I actually find really poetic, but now I’m also looking for ways to give them weight.

GC: In Temporal Portrait, you bring together different generational versions of yourself through digital avatars, AI-generated aging models, and motion capture. What led you to explore time and identity in this way, and how do you see technology as a tool for reinterpreting personal history?

CC: A few years ago, I came across a photograph of my mother as a child—four or five years old, sitting on my great-grandmother’s lap. It was the first time I had ever seen an image of her at that age, and the first time I saw a representation of my great-grandmother, whom I never met. There was something unsettling about that absence. So much of modern Chinese history is marked by loss, with many stories surviving only by spoken recollections.
At the same time, I was experimenting with AI-processed face filters that take your selfie and can instantly turn you into a muscular NBA player or a glamorous movie star. What intrigued me were the aging filters. As I played with them, I started noticing resemblances—to my mother now, and to that rare image of my great-grandmother. It made me wonder: what if I had lived in another time? How little did I really know about the women in my family before me?
That’s where Temporal Portrait began. I developed a workflow to generate aged versions of myself, then combined them with archival photographs—images of myself as a child, alongside those of my grandmother and great-grandmother. The idea of a synthetic “family portrait + self portrait” hybrid emerged. I see this work as a vessel for understanding absence, and an attempt to fill in the gaps where history, memory, and lineage have been fractured.

GC: The work presents an interplay between memory, lineage, and digital embodiment, questioning how we perceive continuity and transformation of the self. How do you see the relationship between digital portraiture and traditional notions of portraiture in art history?

CC: Portraiture is more than representation—it captures not just appearance, but a certain “spirit” or “presence” shaped by memory, perception and imagination. Traditional portraiture seeks to fix a subject in time to affirm identity through permanence. Temporal Portrait, however, resists fixity. It unfolds through subtly animated avatars, existing in a state of flux, neither fully archival nor entirely speculative. Rather than preserving a singular likeness, the avatars here shift, observe, and persist, challenging the notion that a portrait must capture a single definitive self.

GC: Many contemporary explorations of AI and digital embodiment focus on the idea of the ‘eternal body’—enhanced, hybrid, or even post-human. In contrast, Temporal Portrait takes a deeply intimate approach, embracing the natural progression of aging and self-exploration. This perspective feels both fresh and profoundly personal. This notion of vulnerability and self-discovery also seems to resonate throughout your broader body of work. Could you elaborate on your choice to engage with AI in such a way and how it aligns with your artistic vision?

CC: Like you thoughtfully pointed out, the work is not about optimization, or some kind of hyperreal post-human vision. Instead it moves through time in this human way—embracing aging, fragility, and the gaps that exist. At first glance, the work almost reads as a kind of group portrait of a matriarchal family. But then you realize—it’s all the same person, the same figure appearing again and again, shifting through time. AI for this piece was not a tool for perfection but for speculation and visualizing what was fractured or even never recorded.

“Temporal Portrait: Carrie”, 2022. “Poetic Realities”, New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist ©

GC: The figures in Temporal Portrait engage the viewer with subtle movements—breathing, blinking, and holding eye contact—as a gesture of presence and resistance. What role does embodiment and presence play in your work, especially in contrast to the often disembodied nature of digital spaces?

CC: I’m interested in creating digital bodies that feel grounded—giving them a kind of materiality, even as they exist within the ephemerality of simulations and projected light. In Temporal Portrait, motion capture imbued each figure with traces of my own facial movements. They are artificial, yet their presence feels familiar. The clothing, for instance—a girl in a GAP hoodie, immediately recognizable as something from my own childhood in the 2000s. Then another, wearing a Soviet-style army green jacket with a red flower, an exact replica of what my mother wore in that photograph I mentioned earlier. These choices aren’t arbitrary; they become threads through time, anchoring the avatars not just in abstraction, but in something deeply personal, almost tactile. And then there’s the gaze—at moments, they collectively hold eye contact with the viewer, creating this uncanny moment of recognition, a subtle acknowledgment between the real and imagined.

GC: As an artist navigating multiple cultural contexts, how does your transdisciplinary background influence your exploration of hybridity and representation in digital spaces? How do you see Temporal Portrait fitting into this broader discourse?

CC: Growing up between New York and Shanghai, I moved through different visual systems, languages, and histories—an experience that inevitably informs how I approach hybridity in digital spaces. Digital media, by its nature, is fluid, layered, always shifting. It’s an ideal space to explore identity not as something fixed, but as something in motion.
In Temporal Portrait, this hybridity is embedded in both form and process. The figures feel familiar, yet they are constructs—vessels of memory, possibility, and reconstruction. But the work extends beyond the self, it engages with representation as a way to bridge missing links between history and time, and how digital tools can reimagine presence, lineage, and the gaps left in personal and collective memory.

“Temporal Portrait”, Carrie Chen, installation view at Metronom, 2025. Courtesy Metronom ©