Carrie Chen

Primavera 春 (2023) is a digital simulation in which the artist depicts herself at multiple life stages, all coexisting within a blossoming spring landscape. It grows out of an earlier work, Temporal Portrait 时间肖像 (2022), a 3D animation in which Chen used generative AI aging face filters and synthesized those outputs with archival family portraits of her maternal ancestors. The remixed portraits serve as the base textures for each avatar's 3D mesh: digitized composites that feel both intimate and unfamiliar. They are not quite her, but they carry traces of the real, the ancestral, and the synthetic, like memory itself. Chen modeled and rigged each figure, brought it to life through 3D software and facial motion capture, then projected it at life-size scale.

Across both works, Chen entangles family archives, intergenerational memory, and technologies like avatars and AI to explore collective memory and identity: a self made from the sum of those who came before, and future selves shaped not only by the individual but by the interconnected.

In Primavera, Chen turns to personal mythology through an art-historical lens. The same avatars from Temporal Portrait now interact within a sprawling floral meadow, dancing, running, swimming, observing, and embracing, forming allegories of childhood, pleasure, beauty, and renewal. The work draws on Romantic and Renaissance allegorical motifs, as well as the idyllic meadow clearings commonly found in open-world video games. Across these genres, bodily movement through nature signals exploration and transformation. Here, the meadow becomes a setting where past and future collapse into the present, and narratives unfold in non-linear ways. As a meditation on time and existence, Primavera 春 invites viewers to consider life as a cyclical journey, where ancestral echoes are entangled with imagined futures.

About the Artist

Carrie Chen is a Chinese-American artist working across computer animation, game simulation, installation, and video. Drawing on art history and networked media, her practice examines the avatar as a condition of contemporary life: how hybrid identities mediate between physical and virtual worlds, becoming sites of embodiment and vessels for memory and desire. She has exhibited at MMMAD, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, STRP Festival, Epoch Gallery, CultureHub, SIGGRAPH, and SXSW. She is a recipient of the STRP Award for Creative Technology and was the 2024 Emerging Curator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). She teaches 3D Arts as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice and Parsons School of Design.