自 : Self; oneself

This 2015 work is the result of an early experiment in generative AI, where a neural network was trained to understand and recreate the essence of handwritten Chinese characters. Drawing on a database of nearly a million handwritten characters, the model learns to distill their patterns, forms, and textures, ultimately producing entirely new characters that never existed in the original dataset.

The title is a reference to the 1988 book by Xu Bing, who created thousands of fictitious glyphs in the style of ancient Chinese prints from the Song and Ming dynasties. In a similar way, this AI-driven exploration blurs the line between authentic tradition and imaginative creation, inviting us to reflect on the boundaries of written language.