With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, many people have used AI to create paintings, which raises the issue of the future of human painting by hand. The Rui Cunha Foundation, a Macau CSR strategic partner, last week launched a solo exhibition of Macau local artist Henri Wong Sio Hang titled “Plagiarism”, using his works spanning 26 years to explore the theme of the meaning of human painting.

Henri Wong brought four sets of works totalling 50 pieces to the exhibition, which ran from 20 to 24 June. Among the works, the most prominent include Henri’s “copying” collection, which reproduces the works he painted when he was 4 to 5 years old using a method copying traditional Chinese painting.

In this work, the artist “copied and pasted” several childhood hand-drawn paintings, and even the colors, paper quality and brush strokes mimicked the childhood works.

“The development of AI has made me constantly question. With AI technology, are humans required to spend several months painting?” Henri asked. “The development of today’s technology makes people doubt the significance of human painting, but when I discovered my old drawings from when I was four to five years old, I suddenly realised that the meaning of painting is not just the finished product, but also the motive behind the artist’s creation.

“Just like drawing when I was a child, it is purely drawing the scene in front of me, rather than generating it from a bunch of data.”

Henri’s copying of his childhood works is precisely to show that even if the copied work is a stroke-by-stroke reproduction, the work will carry different meanings due to the different creation contexts.