Emi Kusano: An AI Trained on Her Own Face Fills a Museum in Hanno
Emi Kusano trained an AI model on her own face and body, then cast her clones as flight attendants, nurses and brides. End of Nostalgia, her large museum solo, opens at HYPER MUSEUM HANNO in Saitama on November 14.
Emi Kusano's clones are always at work. For Ornament Survival, the Tokyo born artist built a custom AI model trained on her own face and body, then directed the generated doubles to perform endless labor: rows of flight attendants, nurses and brides, uniformed and multiplied. The series plays on 2 meanings of "model," the social role models long expected of women and the AI models that drive the system, and on uniformed professions in Japan where excess care and emotional labor are demanded. "Transformation is no longer presented as a magical miracle, but as a survival strategy," the series text reads.
Faithful reproduction is not the goal. Kusano, born in 1990, works with pasts and memories that might have been, including eras before she was born, and draws on Japanese street cultures from Takenoko zoku and gyaru to decora and Gothic Lolita, generating, selecting and editing images with AI. The museum notes that she prizes a sense of wrongness and discomfort over accuracy, and quotes her calling the act of bringing her own culture into AI "my small resistance, and play, as an artist against a world that keeps growing more uniform" (our translation from the Japanese).
Ornament Survival was shown by √K Contemporary in the ZERO10 sector at Art Basel Hong Kong, March 27 to 29, as prints paired with NFTs. 6 works from the series, among them Collective Persona, Golden Hour Compliance and Nursing the Machine, live on Ethereum as ERC 721 tokens on Verse, each paired with an 841 by 594 mm print.
End of Nostalgia runs from November 14, 2026 to January 31, 2027 at HYPER MUSEUM HANNO, the contemporary art museum inside metsä Village in Hanno, Saitama, directed by Shigeo Goto. Built mostly from new work, the show turns the gallery into a single installation: Memory Metabolism, a towering installation of stacked TV monitors; Mementoid, a sculptural work; Ornament Survival: Future Remains, a new print series; and about 25 Ornament Survival prints, some never shown before. Kusano has shown at M+ in Hong Kong, Saatchi Gallery in London and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and her early Harajuku street snaps were exhibited at the V&A.
Sources
- Emi Kusano, End of Nostalgia, HYPER MUSEUM HANNO press release, metsä (Japanese)
- Emi Kusano solo show at HYPER MUSEUM HANNO, Bijutsu Techo, October 21, 2026 (Japanese)
- Ornament Survival by Emi Kusano, Verse
- Emi Kusano: End of Nostalgia, NFT Culture
- Thumbnail: 2 works from Ornament Survival, courtesy HYPER MUSEUM HANNO and the artist