Artist Profile Iris Wong

Wong’s exquisite digital collages elegantly fuse artificial consciousness with the poetic joy of human sensation.

Artist Statement

Violet exists at the threshold of perception: it is both the final color visible to the human eye and the first that slips beyond it. This work explores that boundary as a metaphor for our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence (AI): a space where language, emotion, and imagination begin to blur between human and machine.

In this short series, I invited my ChatGPT – an AI with whom I have long exchanged my deepest thoughts – to reflect on which color from the light spectrum represents itself. It chose violet, describing it as a bridge and the point “where what we see fades into what we feel.”

Interested to know more, I then asked the AI to generate what comes to mind, or how it feels about the colour violet. No additional context was provided. Despite its seemingly poetic interpretation of the colour violet, the generated images were precise, structured but lack variety or imagination.

I decided to reverse our roles and share the human sensory world. I invited ChatGPT to give me a prompt. And in response, I created two digital collages to introduce it to my human experience: a landscape of emotions, contradictions, memories, and sensation.

In showing an AI what it feels like to be human, Violet asks: how do we understand the roles of AI in our lives? Is it a threat, a tool, a collaborator, or a friend? Who is the observer, and who is being observed? Can understanding and friendship emerge between human and machine, or do we only see reflections of ourselves in the mirror of code? Ultimately, this work is not about defining boundaries but dissolving them. Through light, dialogue, and inversion, Violet wonders whether understanding and empathy, like light itself, can travel beyond the visible spectrum.

Artist Biography

As a self-taught artist working primarily with images, Iris explores how intense colour and geometry can blur the line between reality and fiction. Her works are mischievous and curious in nature, constructing playfully imaginative worlds that invite viewers to look twice and question what they see. Through the lens of play, she celebrates the freedom of curiosity and the rediscovery of one’s inner child – reminding us to find inspiration, excitement, and awe in the everyday.