Yichi Zhang
Pearl+
Pearl+ (2026) From Manovich’s theory of new media modularity to the flexible transfer and recombination of styles and features in generative systems, AI art may point toward a new visual language marked by highly fluid modes of fusion and juxtaposition among heterogeneous elements. This photographic image series explores how a pearlescent surface manifests across fruits, balloons, and other forms within text-to-image generation. The resulting images evoke a surreal estrangement, as familiar objects become visually ambiguous. Moving beyond traditional surrealist collage, this ambiguity does not arise from manual juxtaposition or assembly. Instead, it emerges from the generative system’s capacity to handle heterogeneous elements in a flexible and fluid manner, allowing the artist to examine how the same material quality can migrate across widely divergent object categories. Through this generative logic, the series gestures toward an AI-specific collage aesthetic, one defined by absurdity, heterogeneity, and an internally coherent visual logic.
Yichi Zhang is a Chinese filmmaker and artist working across cinema and digital art. Her cinematic works explore the human predicament within fantasy and magical realist settings, and have been screened at international festivals including the New York Shorts International Film Festival, Vancouver Asian Film Festival, The Fantasy Film Festival Paris, and Palm Springs International ShortFest, among many others. Yichi is a recipient of awards from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Edie and Lew Wasserman Fellowships. She received an MFA in Film Directing from UCLA and a BA in Film Studies from Boston College, and holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from Zhejiang University.