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Vik Muniz:
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Date: 11.5 (wed.) – 12.25 (thu.), 2025
Gallery hours: Tue. – Sat. 11:00 – 19:00 (Closed on Mon., Sun., and National Holidays/ Open during AWT: 11.5~11.9)
Opening reception: 11.8 (sat.) 17:00 – 19:00 (artist in attendance)
nca | nichido contemporary art is pleased to present Threads: Vik Muniz a solo exhibition of new work by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz. Marking Japan’s debut of Muniz’s new series, Threads, the exhibition features images - made especially for this show - which draw on Japanese culture. A kimono shop, an ikebana vase, commuting salarymen, these are just a few examples of what we could interpret as Muniz’s personal visual homage to a country he has come to know and love over the past 30 years. Assembled through the crossed use of different AI programs, this new body of work represents Muniz’s investigation and take on what is considered a rather controversial and sensitive topic. These are tools that, to borrow Muniz’s own words, “we developed to improve our relation with reality”, hence the question we cannot escape: how indeed has this relation been impacted by all this?
Yet, Muniz simultaneously turns to something very tactile and real, which is the use of the ancient craft of embroidery through a collaboration between the artist and a group of Brazilian embroiders, giving an abstract texture to the images, and creating all the while a striking contrast with the use of the latest technologies.
Vik Muniz: Between Artificial Intelligence and Embroidery
Yuko Hasegawa (Curator, Art Historian)
Physical Reality and Contemporaneity – Between Sculptural quality and pop-vibes
Vik Muniz’s contemporaneity cannot be simply interpreted as admiration for the technological achievements of the digital era; it is rather an uncompromising return to the physical matter. For instance, Muniz created portraits of children living in Rio’s favelas using common materials - sugar, chocolate, garbage, sand grains, and dust are just a few examples of the variety of everyday materials Muniz has been experimenting with since the beginning of his career. While definitely not easy to handle, such materials had indeed a sensorial quality attached to them that carried the “weight of reality” and “collective memories”. They functioned as catalysts awakening feelings and memories through the physicality, texture, smell and volume that the actual materials hold.
In Muniz’s work a sculptural sense of composition coexists with pop-humor. Muniz wanders through landscapes woven from the debris of modern consumption - clouds and dirt, wires and threads, illustrated postcards, caviar, peanut butter and jellies, garbage – and reenacts the “illusion of photography” in a contemporary key. Vik’s hands, lightly quoting famous masterpieces, and reconstructing them, while taking advantage of the materials’ plastic properties, are an extension of that pop quality that characterized Warhol’s art of repetition or, yet, of the morphological freedom that Picasso found in African sculptures. Muniz is recontextualizing the very idea of medium embodying the equation medium/ creation.
AI as a Device to Mediate Reality
Recently, Muniz has been fundamentally revisiting the relation between the “act of seeing” and the “act of creating” from today’s perspective while crossing the AI tools Chat GPT and Midjourney. The artist uses an AI language generator and builds prompts with an AI image generator creating an architecture where it is as if two different brilliant minds were engaging in some heated exchanges. That back-and-forth process appears as some sort of intellectual game where two intelligences were simultaneously expanding the realm of creation while competing with each other.
And, to borrow Muniz’s own words, “sometimes, it is kind of satisfying when ChatGPT fools MidJourney”.
Muniz feels both surprised and spooked when the AI tool anticipates his own intentions and shows some judgement. It feels as it is almost reading his mind. “The important thing is not to get to a result that is given to you; you want to get exactly what you want”. While being simultaneously a tool that expands our senses, AI also works as a mirror that irradiates that very structure of desire and satisfaction. The creation of a new space where logic antagonizes feelings - For Muniz, AI is not simply a tool that generates results; it is actually a mediator to re-educate our senses. It is a device that gives visibility to the distance between us and “reality”, or, yet, to our perceptual structure, and tests our own very ability to feel. Such “poetics of the matter” is also connected to today’s common practice of dealing with the immateriality of AI’s technology. Despite using the AI tools to assemble the images, Muniz brings them back to a tactile dimension. Muniz returns once again to the “material” to reconnect the warmth of the human hand to the cold abstract nature of AI.
In this new body of work, Muniz is not recreating famous artworks, nor is he using already existing photos. The artist is relying on AI-generated images – namely “images that do not belong to anyone’s memory”, originated from the prompts generated by Muniz’s language inputs -. Those pictures present a Cubism-like structure where warm colors, such as yellow, orange and red, closely intertwine with expressionistic colors, such as green and blue. By arranging the colorful bits as some sort of patchwork, the whole composition is permeated by a life force charged with a sense of urgency. And that can be seen as an attempt to awaken again the trust in the utopian harmony and structural order that the early 20th century paintings strongly embraced, through the use of a non-human intelligence as AI.
Then, the AI-generated images are recreated through the handwork of Brazilian embroiders. Here, the thread is not some sort of substitute medium for paint; it is actually the expression of the accumulation of those physical presences. Almost as if the warmly layered embroidery’s touch has breathed life and physical memories into the AI’s abstract composition. The intellectual collaboration with AI, seeking Muniz’s “humanity’s assurance”, is enabling a backward transition from information to matter. For a brief moment, the thread’s thickness and temperature remain hidden behind the photos’ planarity, yet, it is inside the viewer’s imagination that its three-dimensionality is restored.
Making its Japanese debut, this body of works frames poetic moments that are hidden in Japan’s everyday life – a scene from the fish market, salary-men commuting on the train, an ikebana floral composition, a monk and a tea ceremony, just to name a few -. The AI-designed compositions are constructed in a Cubism-like fashion and acquire a soft texture thanks to the embroidery element.
Within those constructed bits of everyday life, soft colors and warm touch, we are witnessing a side of reality which we usually overlook. And that is that very “human heat” that dwells deep within Japanese people’s perception; it is a shape of humanity paradoxically emerging from AI’s cold intelligence.
Conclusion – “Experiencing Intelligence” in AI’s times
Muniz’s AI work is not about praising technology, nor is it about taking it down. It is actually a contemporary approach that allows a back-and-forth between “knowing” and “feeling”.
Travelling between AI and embroidery, codes and threads, algorithms and handicraft, Muniz is proposing a new path to train perception. In today's world where technology is evolving at a rapid pace, that is, once more, an act of trust toward the enduring nature of human emotions and reactions. Muniz’s art is a poetic attempt to restore “an intelligence that feels and reacts” in the context of the non-human intelligence of AI.
While sewing the gap between technology and humans, Muniz is handing us back, once again, the “ability to feel reality” today.
Vik Muniz and his Magnum Opus
Keiju Kita (Contemporary Photography Researcher)
Alchemy was an intellectual practice that transformed matter, transmuted thoughts and used techniques like crystallization. When used metaphorically, it can refer to the methodology that allows us to translate matter into concepts, technology into poetry, and collectivity into individuality. The artistic practice of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz can be precisely looked at as the contemporary re-enactment of such an approach.
Nigredo: The Alchemy of Fantasy and Matter
- Tradition and symbology: two distant dimensions torn between worth and worthlessness, materiality and immateriality, time and memory -
Art is the action that, by making different identities confronting each other, gives value to the heat of that friction. Muniz had already experienced that moment when matter is transformed into concept with his body of work Sugar Children (1996), where the artist drew portraits of children using sugar crystals. In his hands, the many materials laying fast asleep at the far corners of the world become “thinking lenses” that expose the very behavioral structure of the act of seeing. It is precisely this certainty that lies at the chore of Muniz’s work.
Far from working as a deceiving trick, the illusion that such lenses reflect functions as a device to help us understand the real world. While at first, and only for a brief moment, the viewer finds themselves fooled by Muniz’s most mischievous illusions, their true nature is soon revealed. And, there, in that temporal fraction, it is where it all begins, from what can be called the “pleasure of destruction”.
In this momentary tremor, the viewer is not a passive agent but rather an active accomplice partaking in defining the meaning of this whole process. For Muniz it is not about showing the physical quality of his work, the technique used or simply the final image. It is about the shimmer of light that goes on in that very moment perception becomes notion.
Albedo: Algorithms to Transition Towards Knowledge
Muniz’s alchemy has now entered unprecedented territory, namely the introduction of AI as medium of his visual thinking device.
Language and algorithms, chosen this time exactly as the artist had approached working with materials such as sugar or chocolate in the past, represent the digital debris that have been overflowing and proliferating within today’s societies, while simultaneously heading towards their deterioration.
Through this exhibition, Muniz is presenting, as one single process, the symbolic reconstruction of Japanese culture where aspects that the artist has come to know and appreciate over his long relationship with the country - tradition, crafts, symbolism - have blended together while diving deep into the universe of technology.
By crossing AI chatbot ChatGPT with AI image generator Midjourney, Muniz draws impressions of Japan where he can be seen standing beyond the back and forth between words and images.
The AI-generated words have been mixed together as to reflect the many stereotypes surrounding Japan’s iconography. Yet, this cannot be simply overlooked as the AI’s attempt to give visual form to such contents; it is a process where thoughts and memories are converted into bits of cultural data. The images filtered through the AI system simultaneously transfer Muniz’s own thoughts to someone else’s imagination, and within that subtle fluctuation, they acquire the ability to transfer perception into notion.
Citrinitas: The Rebirth of Matter and The Revival of Handwork
Today’s AI systems operate by referencing the real world to generate images. Nevertheless, Muniz wonders about the possibility of a future time where images generated from the real world will be replaced by images generated from other images, inevitably leading to a phase of progressive deterioration. Relying on inputs from the AI systems, Muniz creates images that are then fixed in the form of embroidery executed by a group of female artisans from the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, called the Bordadeiras.
The very chore of Muniz’s alchemical process lies in this cycle where AI’s immaterial imagination is returned once again to a tangible dimension, as a result of the handwork involved.
Muniz dares to restore the perfect automatization that technology has dreamed of as “an imperfect handwork”. And there we find a call for a structure to try mend together the pieces of such a divided world.
The friction resulting from that process produces “heat of transformation” which ultimately leads to one of the alchemists’ main goals, namely the creation of gold, which, in this scenario, can be translated as the discovery of new horizons of knowledge.
Assembled in a sort of Cubistic manner, Muniz’s imagery takes over the concept of Cubism as “an alternative way for painters to explore images beyond the hegemonic power of photography”, as the artist puts it himself, and “Analytical Cubism as a strategy to humanize the visual experience”, and it carries it into the AI era in the form of perceptual reconstruction.
Rubedo: The Acquisition of a Thinking Lens Through The Photographic Process
The last phase of Muniz’s alchemy crystallizes in the form of photography.
Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser argues that the imagination that derives from techno-images, including pictures, has the ability to re-code concepts from written language as images.1
For Muniz, photography is the echoing dimension that exists between reality and picture; it is the space where the “code reorganization” takes place transforming thoughts and matter. Muniz’s alchemy finds its completion in this coding process that, in his case, translates into his presenting the final result as a picture. Ultimately, when looking at Muniz’s images, what we are actually staring at is concepts from the real world which have been newly codified. Reconstructed through the assembling of the digital debris Muniz’s alchemy has generated, these images are taking us to a quiet place to ponder over and reevaluate the forthcoming post-AI world, exactly as the artist had done in the past, creating a place to meditate and think through sugar crystal and chocolate sauce.
Muniz’s gaze toward Japan quietly morphs and crystallizes inside that shimmer of light in the form of new relations with the world, while routing through digital thinking and blending with Brazil’s handicraft
Then, the work born as that crystal represents the “philosopher’s stone” of Muniz’s alchemy: a “thinking lens” standing right in front of us to understand the world.
Flusser, V.: Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Published by Keiso Shobo, 1999, Japanese translation by Masafumi Fukagawa, p.16.
Vik Muniz (born in São Paulo, 1961) is a prolific, internationally recognized artist, whose signature style appropriates and reinterprets iconic images of our time. Vik’s artworks were showed are in the collection of major national and international museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern, London, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and others. Vik has been a guest speaker at Harvard, Yale, TED Talks, the World Economic Forum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Princeton University, among others. His has written a book: Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (Aperture, 2005. Waste Land, a documentary about his work in the favelas and landfills around Rio de Janeiro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010.
Vik is also involved in educational and social projects in Brazil and the US and has consistently contributed to many humanitarian campaigns, more recently Humans Right Watch, Imazon, a small Brazilian non-profit dedicated to conserving the Amazon rainforest., among others.
