他者的东方 2.0The Oriental Others 2.02026
《他者的东方》系列创作于2023年至今，两部作品持续探讨了东方的视觉形象如何在他者的观看机制下被反复生产与固化。1.0与2.0在时间与媒介上形成对话，共同揭示历史与技术如何塑造我们对他者的认知。
2.0将这一命题延展到当代技术语境：我将约翰·汤姆逊《中国与中国人影像》的英文文本输入AI图像生成工具，发现人工智能生成的图像和历史图像高度重合又有些许断裂。我又将AI生成的图像返回给图像识别工具进行关键词标注，与原始档案并置，形成一种文本与图像的互文关系。AI在生成时所依循的视觉逻辑，与历史文本的分类与书写结构高度重合，从而揭示算法如何继承并再现殖民时代的认知框架。
正如马克思所言："他们无法代表自己，他们必须被代表。"图像穿越历史和算法，而我们对他者的理解始终建立在分类与标签的基础之上。
The Oriental Others series has been in creation since 2023, with both works continuously exploring how the visual image of the Orient is repeatedly produced and solidified under the gaze of the Other. 1.0 and 2.0 form a dialogue across time and medium, jointly revealing how history and technology shape our perception of the Other.
2.0 extends this proposition into the contemporary technological context: I input the English text from John Thomson's Illustrations of China and Its People into an AI image generation tool, and found that the AI-generated images overlapped significantly yet exhibited subtle ruptures when compared with historical images. I then fed the AI-generated images back into an image recognition tool for keyword tagging, juxtaposing them with the original archives to form an intertextual relationship between text and image. The visual logic that AI follows during generation closely mirrors the classificatory and narrative structures of historical texts, thereby revealing how algorithms inherit and reproduce the cognitive frameworks of the colonial era.
As Marx stated: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." Images traverse history and algorithms, yet our understanding of the Other remains founded upon classification and labeling.
