Chaos Body Shop 無序身體販賣所

This work comprises 456 AI-generated ID photos, 7 photographic collages, and a hand-copied edition of the Diamond Sutra rearranged according to the order of the Bopomofo phonetic system. Through the deconstruction and reconstruction of text and image, it responds to contemporary idolatry, the question of true and false information, and identity politics in the age of AI.

As a child, my height was measured daily; a series of horizontal lines on the wall recorded my growth. But once the body has set, how does thought continue to grow? Each era provides different nourishment: my parents’ generation relied on books and television; mine has been steeped in social media; will the next come of age by chewing on AI-generated text and image?

Situated in Taiwan, this hinge of global politics and geography, I observe that online and offline alike, contemporary netizens and public discourse habitually splice and appropriate concepts out of context, the sole aim being to win the argument. AI, this weapon of mass production, accelerates the dissemination of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation through industrially manufactured text and image at an unprecedented pace.

Notably, in this work, AI generates religious and minority figures with consistent inaccuracy, yet renders characters from cinema, gaming, and anime with remarkable precision—this asymmetry mirrors the imbalance within AI training datasets between dominant and marginal cultures: what is mainstream enough to be repeatedly absorbed is accurately remembered; what is too obscure is overlooked, imagined, miscreated, forgotten. Worse, when these errors are recirculated and ingested into the next round of training data, falsehood becomes truth—when we type a question to the model, it confirms the error as correct, because that is the only data it has consumed. Like an ouroboros: garbage in, garbage out.

The word “idol” originally denoted an object of religious worship, the Greek eidolon, prohibited by the Hebrew decalogue. Its contemporary meaning, however, has shifted toward the veneration of celebrities in popular culture. In Mandarin, the character 神 (shén, “deity”) has likewise been appropriated for secular praise: 神人 (godlike person), 神作 (divine work), 神曲 (divine song), 神來一筆 (stroke of divine inspiration)—the form of veneration has changed, its spiritual structure has not.

The 456 AI-generated ID photos are sequenced from ancient Buddhist and Daoist deities, through traditional and new religious movements of various cultures, tarot archetypes, and folk legends, onward to figures from film, gaming, and anime, closing with political leaders. The most extreme form of contemporary idolatry and apotheosis, after all, may well be political fervor itself.