Kit Lee is a Macau artist who focuses specifically on video art, sound installation and new media art. Her recent animation series 8 Immortals Across the Sea is inspired by the well-known Chinese legend of the Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea.
The background landscapes were generated with AI, and the animation combines colloquial terms from the Hong Kong and Macau region, specifically the phrase “crossing the sea,” which refers to gambling in Macau.
8 Immortals Across the Sea primarily depicts the story of eight mortals who attain immortality and cross the sea to participate in the Peach Banquet. In this artwork, the original characters are reimagined as eight stray cats who have achieved enlightenment. They travel to Macau using their magical instruments.
Inspired by traditional Chinese landscape paintings often featuring the Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea, the artwork combines the eight magical tools with Macau’s architecture and tableware, showcasing the diverse facets of Macau’s tourism and entertainment industry. The overall piece is enhanced by the use of Portuguese-style tile art, emphasizing Macau’s unique character.
“AI has advanced rapidly, and we are striving to learn how to effectively collaborate with it,” says Kit, who graduated from the Tainan National University of The Arts, Taiwan. “In the past, some artwork needed a lot of time and human resources, but now AI is changing that. AI can speed up your workflow as an assistant tool.”
In creating her artwork, Kit often uses ComfyUI a web-based interface for Stable Diffusion, which is a state-of-the-art learning model capable of generating realistic images and art from text descriptions.
“The results are generated by AI, which has bias, so when we use AI, we always need to be aware of this, but overall I am optimistic about AI in the coming years. The fact is that technology has always been developing since the past, and we have been integrating with it all the time.”
