About Ornament Survival
Set against the backdrop of an attention economy flooded with AI-generated content, this photographic series explores the polysemy of the word "model." The countless figures crowding these images, clad in standardized uniforms, offer attentive care. They embody the societal "role models" historically expected of women, while simultaneously acting as the literal "AI models" (training data) driving the system.
In creating this work, Kusano built a custom AI model trained on the data of her own face and body. The process of converting herself into data and directing her generated clones to perform endless labor embodies a contemporary reality: one where cuteness and attentiveness are stripped of personal identity,becoming mass-producible specifications.
In Japan, professions that require uniforms—such as nurses or flight attendants—are often expected to perform like "idols," providing an excess of care and emotional labor. Kusano cynically depicts how this "Emotional Labor" is internalized and turned into a mere signifier. Historically, in Japanese subculture, "transformation" was an ambivalent act—simultaneously a symbol of empowerment for girls and an object of sexual consumption by the gaze of others. In this work, that act is coldly updated. It is no longer a magical miracle, but a harsh survival strategy: optimizing oneself into an "ornament" evaluated by algorithms and public metrics simply to survive the system.
This work confronts not a distant sci-fi future where AI replaces humans, but the reality of our present. It asks what "models" of behavior we are already learning and reproducing with our own bodies in our daily lives. Through overwhelming multiplicity, Kusano visualizes the distortion of a society that consumes humans as vessels for data, sharply updating the art-historical discourse on the body and reproduction for the age of AI.
About Emi Kusano
Multidisciplinary Artist
Born in Tokyo in 1990. Her practice integrates emergingtechnologies, including AI, to explore nostalgia, pop culture, and collective memory. By visualizing thedialogue between past and present through a retro-futuristic aesthetic, she invites viewers to reconsidercontemporary society.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in over 20 countries at major institutions including M+ (Hong Kong), Saatchi Gallery (London), Grand Palais Immersif (Paris), and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, as well as at major international art fairs such as Frieze and Paris Photo.

Large Print on paper,
aluminum frame, NFT

Medium Print on acrylic board, NFT

Sculpture, NFT






























