A small cohort for artists working at the edge of AI and their own practice.

“If AI can show me what I couldn't see — does the act of seeing still belong to me?”

What this is?

Every serious artist who has worked with AI has encountered the same moment: the tool produces something you didn't intend, and you don't know whether to call it yours.

That moment is not a technical problem. It is an artistic one.

The Latent Light Research Group is a small, invitation-based cohort for artists who have felt that discomfort and want to stay with it — not to resolve it through better technique, but to understand what it reveals about authorship, perception, and the nature of image-making itself.

This is not a class. There is no teacher and no student. It is not a study group. We are not here to accumulate knowledge. It is not a production team. No one will ask for deliverables.

It is a working space — without walls, without hierarchy — where each artist continues their individual practice while sharing the questions that practice generates.

What we bring to the table?

The group draws on theoretical frameworks — Barthes, Berger, Sontag, Lacan, Levinas — not as academic exercises, but as working tools. When a photograph fails to communicate what the photographer felt, there is a name for that gap. When an AI-generated image unsettles us without knowing why, there is a language for that unease.

We use that language. And we look for what it cannot yet say.

Who we are looking for?

Artists with an existing practice: photography, painting, video, or writing. You have made work seriously for some years. You have an eye, a set of instincts, a relationship with your medium that predates AI.

You have worked with AI tools — and you are not entirely comfortable with what happened.

You are not looking for better prompts. You are not looking to be taught. You are looking for people who will sit with the same unresolved questions, and take them seriously.

If that is you, we would like to talk.

How it works?

Small cohort: 4 to 5 members, including the convener.
Duration: Two years (or more).
Meeting: Once a month, in person. Seoul.
Language: Korean and English.
Cost: Shared equally among all members — including the convener.

The first several months are devoted to establishing the ground: reading together, sharing individual practices, and finding the questions we actually hold in common. What we make of these two years is decided by the group, not prescribed in advance.

Who convenes this?

Young Chai (Avocado) is a photographer and AI art educator based in Seoul. He began photography around 70 and has spent the years since working at the intersection of AI image-generation and photographic theory. Before that: four decades of molecular genetics research and scientific publication. Emeritus Professor, Hanyang University.

He brings the habits of a scientist — precision, rigor, skepticism toward easy answers — to questions that science does not ask: What does an image remember? What does it lose?

His long-term artistic inquiry centers on love unremembered — the experience of care that was present but never consciously registered, visible only when the conditions of perception change.

He is not looking for students. He is looking for artists who will make him/her think harder.

Contact

If you are interested, write to: [nanog.lux@gmail.com]

Please tell us briefly: what you make, how long you have made it, and what AI has done to your relationship with your own work.

We will respond to everyone.

[Apr.09. 2026]