At Paris Photo 2025, ArtVerse Gallery’s booth F11 presented Scenes: The Sensory and the Remembered in the Digital Age, an exhibition that marked a pivot point for photography as it moves beyond mechanical capture into algorithmic generation.

The show, curated by Grida (Hyewon Jang) was part of Tezos Foundation x ArtVerse partnership for Paris Photo 2025, running from November 12 -16 at the Grand Palais. It gathered six practitioners whose work operates at the boundary where photography stops being about what cameras see and starts being about what code can generate.

The pieces, viewable both physically and online via objkt.one drop page, ask what happens to photography when the photograph loses its need for a camera, when memory becomes synthetic, when the sensory becomes computational.

At the time of publication, the showcase had moved more than 66k xtz in sales, evidence that collectors are taking digital works seriously. Let’s take a closer look at the six exhibiting artists.

*Auntie Amelia Loves Numbers* by NiceAunties. Credit: NiceAunties

NiceAunties

Niceaunties, the Singapore-based artist behind the sprawling Auntieverse project, works with a disappearing subject. The Asian auntie, that ubiquitous cultural figure marked by practical wisdom, fierce bargaining, and generational quirks, exists in family memory and social shorthand but rarely in official archives.

So Niceaunties builds the archive herself, using AI.

Her background in architecture informs how she constructs these speculative portraits: each image a small world where aunties occupy spaces they historically have avoided, doing things they traditionally refused, preserved in synthetic amber. The Guardian, Forbes, and The Straits Times have covered her work. She spoke at TED Vancouver. The City of West Hollywood commissioned Aunties on Sunset as public art.

Credit: Bryan Piekolek, courtesy of ArtVerse

For Paris Photo, she brings this project into direct conversation with photography’s documentary legacy. The centerpiece of the project is a series of 13 animated auntie portraits, each minted as a 1/1 on Tezos and paired with its own signed physical print. Alongside the portraits sits an interactive Napoleon III mirror that reflects the viewer’s body while replacing their face with an auntie avatar—an entry point into the work’s playful inquiry into how we carry our inner aunties. Together, these elements form a constellation of characters shaped by warmth, bluntness, and inherited cultural instincts. The works extend NiceAunties’ exploration of the “auntie love language,” treating each figure not as a stereotype but as a vessel of memory, humor, and intergenerational truth.

*Overseer — Office Ladies: Rituals of Overflow* by Emi Kusano. Credit: Emi Kusano

Emi Kusano

Emi Kusano’s trajectory maps photography’s recent transformation. She started shooting street fashion in Harajuku, traditional documentary work with subjects in real space and decisive moments. Now she generates algorithmic self-portraits where authorship blurs between her intentions and machine learning’s probabilistic outputs.

Her Office Ladies: Rituals of Overflow series, created specifically for Paris Photo, takes workplace stereotypes and feeds them through AI until they fragment and recombine. The resulting images look photographic with proper lighting and convincing detail, yet they document nothing. Instead, they perform a kind of speculative sociology, using AI doppelgängers to examine service labor, consumption, and female identity in late capitalism.

Credit: Bryan Piekolek, courtesy of ArtVerse

Kusano’s exhibition history spans the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Saatchi Gallery, and the V&A. She launched the curated AI series Melancholic Magical Maiden on Art Blocks in 2024. That same year, she presented generative AI fashion at Christie’s 3.0 alongside Gucci, a collaboration that positioned her firmly within Web3’s expanding art infrastructure.

Her work for Scenes explores what she calls “the algorithmic fragmentation of selfhood.” In her process, the self becomes probabilistic, generated through repeated iterations where the machine proposes and the artist selects. Photography becomes a dialogue between intention and automation, between data and desire. The image that results carries traces of this negotiation, simultaneously nostalgic and alien, memory mixed with simulation.

*The Quiet Burn*, 2021-2025, digital animation. Open edition. Credit: Reuben Wu

Reuben Wu

Reuben Wu stages light rather than capturing it.

A founding member of electronic band Ladytron, Wu transitioned fully to visual art during a 2012 sabbatical, bringing a musician’s sense of composition and a designer’s precision to landscape photography. His signature technique involves mounting lights on drones and flying them through long exposures over ancient monuments and remote terrain: Stonehenge, Mongolian peaks, desert formations.

Credit: Bryan Piekolek, courtesy of ArtVerse

His images have appeared everywhere from National Geographic (his 2022 Stonehenge cover story won Pictures of the Year International’s award for Online Storytelling) to campaigns for Apple, Google, and Mercedes-Benz. But the commercial work follows the personal experimentation, the other way around has never been true.

At Paris Photo, Wu’s new releases extend his long-running dialogue between landscape, light, and human intervention, presenting two works that operate on parallel but complementary registers. Homage to Homage to the Square reframes Josef Albers’ chromatic logic through the open expanse of the sea, embedding a precise geometric form within an otherwise unpredictable environment. The Quiet Burn pushes that tension further, using drone-mounted illumination and a non-linear timelapse to bend the desert’s natural rhythms into something part signal, part apparition. Taken together, the works trace Wu’s evolution from photographic documentation to engineered perception—images in which light behaves less like a tool and more like an active collaborator shaping atmosphere, scale, and meaning.

*Ophelia, Reassembled* by Shavonne Wong. Credit: Courtesy of Shavonne Wong

Shavonne Wong

Shavonne Wong’s figures exist only in code.

The Singapore-based artist, originally trained in fashion photography, taught herself 3D modeling during COVID-19 lockdowns when traditional photographic subjects became unavailable. Now she constructs hyperreal virtual humans entirely in digital space, figures that look photographic, lit and composed with traditional rigor, but created from code rather than captured from life.

Her collaborations include Vogue Singapore, Bang & Olufsen, and Lancôme. She’s exhibited at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum and showed at Venice Biennale 2022’s NFT collateral programming.

Credit: Bryan Piekolek, courtesy of ArtVerse

For Scenes, Wong presents virtual portraiture that raises fundamental questions about photography’s relationship to presence. Her luminous avatars (beautiful, uncanny, technically perfect) challenge whether photographic realism requires a real subject. If the image looks photographic, employs photographic lighting and composition, evokes photographic emotion, does it matter that the subject never breathed?

Wong’s practice suggests photography has become less about recording what exists and more about constructing what feels photographically true.

Grant Yun

Grant Yun paints digitally and avoids cameras entirely. Yet his work appears in an exhibition about photography’s evolution because he thinks photographically.

With a background in classical realism and urban architecture, Yun constructs minimalist landscapes of suburban America: highways at dusk, empty parking lots, baseball fields suspended in golden light. The scenes carry the weight of memory despite being entirely invented. His visual language borrows photography’s core concerns: composition, negative space, the pregnant stillness of suspended time.

Yun’s available works, Consume and Aerial California, sold out during the fair.

Credit: Bryan Piekolek, courtesy of ArtVerse

His market presence is substantial. In the past, works have sold for six figures on SuperRare and Nifty Gateway. Collectors include prominent Web3 figures like Cozomo de’ Medici and 6529. He’s sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, held a solo show at Christie’s Los Angeles in 2024, and participated in Proof Collective’s Grails III.

At Paris Photo, Yun’s inclusion makes a conceptual argument: that photography’s essence lies in its way of seeing rather than its tools. His digital paintings demonstrate how photographic sensibility can persist across mediums, how the impulse to frame and isolate and preserve can operate without mechanical capture.

*Every Shade of Crimson Tells the Stories We Once Knew III* by Genesis Kai. Credit: Genesis Kai

Genesis Kai

Genesis Kai introduces the exhibition’s most radical proposition: What if the photographer exists outside human biology?

Kai is a chiral twin, a digital alter ego created by Korean-Hong Kong artist Ming Shiu, who began her practice as a photographer before engineering this speculative entity. Kai operates as an autonomous visual subject designed to question authorship, memory, and image-making in post-human terms.

Her debut came at Asia Now 2022, where she became the first artificial artist to present robotic and video installations at a major European fair. Since then, she’s shown across Paris, London, Dubai, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Lisbon. She’s participated in exhibitions at NFT Paris, Boulevart Dubai, NFC Lisbon, and collaborated with institutions including New York University and Pingshan Art Museum. Lev Manovich selected her work for the CIFRA project at Ars Electronica 2023.

Credit: Bryan Piekolek, courtesy of ArtVerse

For Scenes, Kai presents digitally reconstructed Joseon-era moon jars printed on traditional hanji paper, cultural artifacts processed through computational memory. The work proposes how machines might remember cultural heritage, how AI might encode tradition through its own logic rather than documenting existing objects.

Kai’s presence at Paris Photo asks what happens when the photographer has computational intelligence to draw from rather than human experience, when algorithmic logic shapes aesthetic choices instead of biological memory. Her images suggest a future where visual culture is co-created by artificial intelligence, operating as independent agents with their own ways of seeing rather than tools wielded by humans.

Scenes: The Sensory and the Remembered in the Digital Age ran through November 12-16 at Paris Photo’s Digital Sector, Booth F11, and online at objkt.one.