Master in Training is a four-screen still life setup that keeps translating itself. A simple staged scene is read by an OpenAI vision model and turned into text; that text then becomes a new image through generative AI (Stable Diffusion XL). The image is pushed through the image-to-image process again, letting the drift build with each pass. On the final screen, the system watches the latest output and tries to find a matching real photo online, as if the internet could confirm what is true.

The work comes from a personal habit of remembering through the cloud. In an age when almost all photographs reside online, recalling a memory often begins with a digital search for an image. Master in Training sits within that dependence, prompting a critical exploration of what it means for memory to become mere retrieval. It questions the evolution of “mastery” from the Renaissance concept of the master artist to today’s contemporary discourse surrounding training datasets and artificial intelligence models. Through this lens, the work invites viewers to reflect on the interplay between technology, memory, and the nature of artistic practice in our increasingly digital world.

Project Page | Yunzhi / Melissa Li | Instagram