Precious Mirror 宝鉴

June 2025

Combining heritage with new technology, opening up infinite unseen visions, and catalysing a new culture for the future, "Precious Mirror" uses contemporary AI art to revive gay Chinese cultural heritage, which has been largely forgotten since the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, due to the early 20th-century Western cultural influence. While modern queer visibility often seems Western-centric, male homoeroticism was once prevalent in China, particularly intertwined with the opera world in China's Qing Dynasty (1644-1912).

"Precious Mirror", a generative AI installation, is based on "Precious Mirror for Grading Flowers / Pinhua baojian," a 1849 classical Chinese novel portraying male opera actors and their male admirers in Qing dynasty Beijing. "Precious Mirror" transforms Chapter 10 from this 60-chapter, 431,000-character novel into rapidly morphing, hallucinatory images of infinite possibilities.

In Chapter 10, Ziyu, a scholarly young man, the protagonist, finally meets Qinyan, an aloof yet beautiful young male opera actor he deeply admires. However, the plot takes an unexpected twist. The artwork shifts from monochrome to color when Ziyu's name is about to be mentioned, then reverts. This symbolizes Ziyu's love coloring Qinyan's life.

"Precious Mirror" features the oscillation and blending of East-West cultures. This work delves into premodern gay Chinese culture before contact with Western culture, yet it was created and first exhibited in the modern West. "Pinhua baojian's" classical Chinese texts from 1849 were translated into English by GPT-4/GPT-4o in 2024, serving as the generative AI prompts. Due to the frequent Chinese cultural references, such as names and locations, and the AI model's tendency to generate Western imagery, "Precious Mirror" oscillates between Eastern and Western visuals.

"Precious Mirror" celebrates the scholarly preservation of premodern Chinese gay literature and hopes for continued global cultural exchange, fostering cultures that align with human hearts and desires.