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
Video (Edition 5)
Comment by Kensho Tambara
The figures that recur in Kusano’s work; 80s Japanese pop idols, mahou-shoujo magical girls, nurses, receptionists, and other stylized feminine archetypes, did more than populate the visual culture of their time. For many girls growing up in Japan in the 1990s, they offered recognizable models through which transformation, visibility, and agency could be imagined. Yet their appeal was inseparable from highly coded forms of femininity within a male-dominated, post-bubble Japan, carrying expectations around appearance, desirability, and behavior. Amidst a growing trend in popular anime toward female protagonists who transform, or henshin (変身), as in franchises like Sailor Moon, these images held out the possibility that girls, too, could become something else. Even so, that possibility remained bound to familiar norms governing how femininity should appear and behave.
In her new series, Ornament Survival, Kusano approaches this tension from within. She has spoken of how she admired these images growing up, while also recognizing how they were shaped by gendered expectations and the male gaze. This dual position underpins the work. The figures she returns to are part of a visual environment that informed her sense of self, shaping how transformation, femininity, and agency were first encountered as lived experience.
Rather than resolving this tension, Kusano re-enters these images. Drawing on childhood play; dressing dolls, assigning roles, and staging scenes, she treats identity as something assembled through rehearsal rather than something fixed. At the center of Ornament Survival is a body of AI-generated images in which she uses her own image to stage speculative selves. These images unfold as a sequence of attempts, each adjusting familiar roles through shifts in styling, posture, and context. What emerges is not a set of parallel what-if universes, but a continuous recomposition of culturally learned roles. The central sculpture taking the form of an enlarged toy makeup compact, echoes the transformation devices from magical girl culture and reinforces this element of childhood play.
In Kusano’s hands, the use of generative AI continues a lifelong process through which identity is formed in relation to existing images. At the same time, her use of a model trained on her own face and body marks a decisive shift: the self is rendered into a form that can be repeated, modified, and scaled, approaching what she describes as a “standard” within a system. What is rehearsed here is not only identity, but its conversion into data. By engaging how these forms persist through repetition, Kusano opens onto a broader question: how images continue to instruct the self as they circulate with unprecedented speed and intimacy, and how identity is continuously adjusted to remain visible and legible, where appearance becomes a site of negotiation, and where performing these forms begins to resemble a means of survival.