The Mute, (2025), synthetic images

The images in this series continue my interest in using machine learning to visualise narrative, particularly those missing from my mother’s emigration story from Thailand in the 1970s, and the wider historical context surrounding it. The images depict an imagined exodus of pregnant Thai women with luggage in 1970s Bangkok, standing in as AI-generated aggregates of women who were peripheral witnesses to geopolitical events.

These events include Thailand’s involvement in the Vietnam War across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the presence of the American military in the region; and the rise of commercial tourism in Thailand, which helped fuel the emergence of cross-cultural marriages between Asian women and Western men. I consider these historical factors in relation to my mother’s own emigration to Australia and experience of loss in war, stories which I have inherited.

Extending from my earlier work Counterfactual Departures that nodded to the language of staged photography, this series foregrounds the figure of the Thai bride rendered in the style of documentary imaging. I work within and against the visual language of documentary photography, with its familiar iconography and subjects shaped by a Western gaze.