Artwork

Kun Song’s gleaming, immersive installations question systems of belief, be they religious, cultural, or technological. Working with various media including photography, moving image, and AI (artificial intelligence), Kun often foregrounds the physical presence of technology to reflect on how it intersects with faith, identity, and experiences of diaspora. “We often forget that AI is not only rooted in our material world – in cables, servers, wires – but also, in our cultural and religious histories which carry the weight of human biases and errors.”

Kun holds a BA in Photography from the University of Westminster and an MA from the Royal College of Art. He has been the finalist of the 2024 Taylor Wessing Portrait Award by National Portrait Gallery, England, and more recently the finalist of the 2025 Hellerau Photography Award, Germany. Blending traditional photography with emerging digital technologies, Kun’s installations often incorporate live computer vision, machine learning algorithms, and facial recognition to engage both machine and audience in the act of making. “I use AI as a collaborator, not just a tool,” Kun notes. “I want to dismantle and understand everything, break it down to its essence and rebuild it – just like machine learning does. It takes the abstract and the fluid, and reshapes them into something structural, something we come to perceive as fact.”

This inherent mutability of algorithms is a central theme of Kun’s latest body of work, most prominently explored in One, an AI-driven interactive installation. Featuring a constellation of flickering lightboxes projecting various portraits of Christ, all generated from a dataset Kun compiled through years of research in national galleries across Western Europe, the piece calculates the viewers resemblance rate to Jesus. “Jesus’s image runs like a thread across time and cultures,” explains Kun. “He is one of the most recognisable figures in Western culture which continues to shape the dominant narratives we live with today. Similarly, AI has become increasingly important in our lives, (re)producing such dominant narratives.” With each interaction, the installation’s dataset continuously evolves, offering different resemblance rates every time. “This ‘error’ and indeterminacy of AI is also the anchor of my work – it keeps the installation alive and in flux as long as it continues to exhibit,” explains Kun. Embracing technology’s fluidity, the piece demonstrates, with humour and play, how AI’s conception of truth dilutes and expands endlessly through human interaction and input.

Facial recognition and surveillance systems are also the subject of pieces like Face of Our Time, an ongoing project of AI-generated ID photos of Chinese factory workers who volunteered to participate in the making of the piece. By examining how AI recognises, processes, and differentiates facial features, the work explores the cultural, political, and racial biases underpinning these systems. Kun however insists his works are ‘open questions’ animated by curiosity rather than critique, ultimately inviting viewers to ponder upon the underlying human flaws shaping AI today, and to become active agents in the process of transforming them. “I’m not against AI or technology.” explains Kun. “In fact I’m fascinated by it. I think of it as a kind of performance: porous and contradictory, methodical yet, in some ways, absurd, Sisyphus-like.”