Auntiescapes by niceaunties

In her ongoing AI-driven world-building project Auntieverse, a Singaporean artist niceaunties explores the cultural archetype of the auntie, that,  in many Asian societies, is both a familial title and a social label, carrying assumptions about age, personality, and societal roles. Auntieverse reclaims this term, transforming aunties into protagonists, figures of humour, resilience, and self-expression, moving through speculative cities, surreal economies, and imagined futures.

The project operates as both an archive and a reinterpretation of a distinct cultural figure — one shaped by specific social codes, behaviours, and forms of expression that are gradually shifting and may disappear over time. It preserves a complex cultural identity: care masked as critique, resilience shaped through adaptation, and a constant negotiation between past and present.

Its imagery has been developed over more than three years using various AI text-to-image and image-to-video tools. Since its inception, the project has expanded beyond the digital into sculpture, mixed media, academic research, and film.

From its inception, Auntieverse has evolved thematically and formally, transitioning from explorations of social and community life to environmental concerns. 

Auntiescapes extends that trajectory through a sustained investigation of the body. Bringing together works developed from 2025 to the present, it builds on earlier series such as Spring Skin (2024), Under My Skin (2024), Auntiebody (2024), and the Spa Menu chapter (2023–2024), which examined beauty, skin, and the societal pressures placed on the female body. The current body of work shifts focus towards less visible dimensions: energy, emotion, and the ways internal states imprint themselves onto physical form.

For niceaunties, the body is a living (quite literally) landscape. Skin behaves like terrain, continuously renewing, hosting microorganisms, and responding to cycles much like the Earth itself, while flesh becomes geological, layered with memory and time. Emotions move through it as forces, shaping and reshaping perception. This reflects an understanding of the body as inseparable from its environment, proposing a continuous exchange between self and world.

Drawing on philosophical reflections such as those of Alan Watts, the work questions the systems of naming and categorisation imposed upon bodies, particularly female bodies. By loosening these labels, the exhibition opens a space in which the body can be encountered as fluid, unstable, and irreducible to fixed definitions.

Individual works articulate this inquiry through different registers. Hot Bod reflects on the transformation of the menopausal body; Cycles traces rhythms of renewal; Junk Butt addresses accumulation and the need for release; Body Bag examines surgical intervention as both vulnerability and control. In Auntgel, a giant auntie inhabits a landscape, gently pouring tea as a gesture of balance, the need for moderation, equilibrium, and patience with ourselves, which considers wellbeing as an ongoing act of calibration between internal and external forces.

Homebody and Falls initially appear as surreal landscapes — a smoking volcano, a cascading waterfall. On closer look, the terrain is made of epidermis, flesh, and aunties. The body becomes landscape, collapsing the boundary between figure and environment and reinforcing the exhibition’s central idea: the body is continuous with the world it inhabits.

At the centre of the exhibition is an interactive installation Mirror into the Auntieverse. The viewer’s reflection is replaced by an auntie who delivers familiar, often blunt observations, confronting the internalised voice of judgement as both cultural inheritance and intimate dialogue. First presented at Paris Photo in 2025, the work extends the project’s engagement with photography as both image capture and psychological reflection.

Together, the exhibition invites reflection on identity, physical presence, and the deep interconnectedness between body, environment, and unseen emotional worlds.