2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize

a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd

Johanna Ng

a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024 inkjet print on cotton rag, inkjet print on clear film 80.5 x 59.4 cm

This work traces the parallel erasure of Asian identities in computer vision and network television. I began by taking screenshots every time an Asian body would appear in Sex and the City. These screenshots were photographed into new compositions, recentering Asian extras in SATC’s periphery. These new compositions were fed through Google’s image-to-text and then text-to-image AI engines. Ultimately, an image of an Asian woman becomes “a woman” and “a woman” conjures the image of a white one.