How is the subjective sense of "beauty" formed? The Pygmalion Project begins with a fundamental question about the artist's own aesthetic sense. Artist Cho Hyunseo, WWF's 14th Friend, works with digital technology and installation art. Utilizing technologies such as AI, VR, and 3D, she captures and documents modern life in the space between the real and the virtual. She presents the familiar but ambiguously floating virtual world in the form of installation art by materializing it into reality. She makes the virtual world tangible and mediates both. At first glance, the work appears to be 'technical', but it is based on a great interest in 'humanity' and 'emotion'. The Pygmalion project also utilizes AI technology. In her previous work, , in which a giant waterfall of receipts is constantly generated by an AI that has learned to recognize aspects of countless images on social media, she saw the innocence and bias of AI in the process of interpreting images. The Pygmalion project is the process of tracing back the artist’s taste using these characteristics. Initially, the AI interprets the input data as numerical values that do not have any meaning. Images represented by horizontal and vertical pixel values and color information are free of social conventions and inherent meanings. However, if you select and input data with a specific intention, it learns your biased view and taste as a single piece of information. The artist found a similar point to the process of building human taste and replicated her own senses.

Cho Hyunseo inputs 10,000 images that she finds beautiful. After learning her sense of taste, the AI generates new images. These are categorized into 34 systems and stored as individual data values. Finally she takes the abstract senses out and puts them into a compartmentalized palette. And then she selects and mixes them on the palette to create ‘Galateia’. The artist named the program 'Pygmalion'. Pygmalion is a person who made his idea as a sculpture. Here, the AI is the sharp burin that carved Galateia.

The exhibition is organized around the artist's workplace, which shows the process. The white desk on the 3rd floor is an actual workplace desk with images, small sculptures, and books. For the prototype of Galateia, the artist made her own dictionary and flipped through it page by page. From the myriad of images, she chose the elements and combined them to create sketches and mock-ups. The result is on the 3rd floor terrace. The terrace, which is the space where the actual painting process takes place, is overlaid with both drafts and works. The artist deconstructs and assembles several images, silkscreens them, and sprays them to create the painting Galatea. Audiences are naturally drawn to view Galateia touching the sky. You can see the virtual paintings and the images borrowed from them upstairs. If the third floor and the terrace area show us the process and the realized result, the 4th floor is where we meet Galateia and his palette in the virtual world. The image, detached from its specific form and dissolved, becomes a paint. Now able to be stroked, the image is transformed into a new form of Galateia in virtual space. Audiences can observe it in detail in front of a slowly rotating screen.

Through this exhibition, the artist reflects on the human sense of taste, especially her own, and proposes a way to utilize AI technology in the art. She experiments with the possibilities of a collaboration between humans and technology through a collaboration between the two with appropriate autonomy and control.