Bronze Generative, Algorithmic, Parametric and AI-Assisted Design · 2026
As I Remember Them Generative Art
by Bowen Shen
- A' Design Award 2026 Bronze Winner in Generative, Algorithmic, Parametric and AI-Assisted Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- CLIENT: Bowen Shen
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 11,536
- Verification code FC058FBB3F · Verify this award
About As I Remember Them Generative Art
This generative art series depicts everyday childhood moments through AI assisted image making. The work focuses on scenes such as school recess, quiet summer afternoons at home, and New Year celebrations, drawn from lived experience in Northern China. Created through guided prompting and manual visual editing, the series prioritizes realism while allowing subtle visual irregularities that reflect how memory preserves feeling rather than exact detail.
Bowen Shen's As I Remember Them Generative Art engages the rich tradition of Romantic landscape painting where individual figures confront sublime natural or constructed vistas, yet translates this centuries-old pictorial convention into contemporary digital expression through generative algorithmic processes, positioning the work at the intersection of historical artistic discourse and cutting-edge computational creativity. The compositional achievement demonstrates sophisticated understanding of atmospheric perspective and spatial layering, constructing three distinct zones that guide the eye from the commanding foreground silhouette through architecturally punctuated middle ground to the billowing industrial background, each zone rendered with appropriate tonal diminution and detail reduction that creates convincing illusionistic depth within the two-dimensional picture plane. The chromatic restraint proves particularly effective, deploying a limited palette of complementary warm yellows and cool blues that evoke both the temporal specificity of transitional daylight and the emotional resonance of melancholic contemplation, the subtle gradations between pale butter tones and soft teals suggesting either dawn's awakening or dusk's gentle closing while avoiding definitive temporal resolution. The silhouette treatment of the primary figure recalls both the simplified forms of early animation cel backgrounds and the archetypal anonymity of universal human experience, the careful attention to costume details such as the gathered topknot, voluminous coat buttons, and carried briefcase providing sufficient specificity to suggest narrative while maintaining symbolic openness through the obscured facial features and flattened tonal rendering. The industrial elements dominating the background invite consideration of humanity's constructed environments and the psychological experience of moving through spaces marked by production, infrastructure, and collective labor, the billowing plumes rising in organic curves that contrast poetically with the geometric rigidity of the architectural silhouettes below, suggesting perhaps the interplay between natural processes and human construction, or the atmospheric consequences of industrial activity rendered with aesthetic beauty rather than documentary critique. The work demonstrates technical facility characteristic of sophisticated generative systems, the seamless tonal transitions and controlled atmospheric effects suggesting either advanced digital painting techniques or well-tuned algorithmic parameters that successfully translate aesthetic intention into visual output, the overall surface unity and chromatic coherence indicating careful post-processing or refined generative training. One might observe how the scale relationships position the viewer in implicit identification with the solitary figure, sharing the perspective of one who observes vast systems while maintaining individual presence, inviting reflection on personal journeys through collective spaces, moments of solitary contemplation amid complex environments, and the universal human experience of feeling simultaneously small within and essential to the constructed world we inhabit.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- As I Remember Them is a generative art series that visualizes fragments of memory, emotion, and longing. It is an attempt to reconstruct the past through the lens of imagination.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 1856 x 2464px image series
- Tags
- Generative AI art, Nostalgia, Childhood memories, Northern China, Visual storytelling, MidJourney, Photoshop, Digital art
- Production Technology
- This series was created with MidJourney, using iterative prompting and reference-based descriptions to shape culturally specific scenes. Outputs were then refined in Photoshop through compositing, retouching, and color adjustments, ensuring the final work aligned with my artistic vision and emotional intent.
- Design Challenge
- The greatest challenge was translating personal, culturally specific memories into AI-generated images. MidJourney lacked context for the textures of Northern Chinese life, requiring me to break scenes into elements, source references, and iteratively refine prompts. Balancing realism with the quirks of AI output, and deciding when to embrace its distortions, was both the obstacle and the creative breakthrough.
- Project Duration
- The project was created virtually over the span of one month in January 2025.
- Operation Flow
- The generative art is experienced through sequential viewing. Each image presents a self-contained moment, allowing viewers to pause, observe, and form personal associations. The series encourages slow viewing rather than interaction through controls, inviting audiences to connect individual scenes to their own memories and emotional experiences.
- Research
- Process documentation: https://bit.ly/49OvkvG
Type of Research: Practice-based creative research.
Research Objectives: To explore how AI can represent personal and culturally specific memories.
Methodology: Iterative visual experimentation and technical study.
Data Collection and Tools: Memory recall, curated reference images, MidJourney style parameters, prompting techniques, Photoshop.
Participants or Experiments: Repeated prompt and image generation cycles.
Results: Increased control over style, detail, and emotional accuracy.
Insights and Impacts: Structured prompting reduces emotional flatness in AI art.
Real Life Effects: Encourages more human-centered AI use in design and visual storytelling. - Inspiration
- Bothered by how often GenAI outputs felt soulless, the project set out to render a deeply soulful subject, the emotional landscape of childhood.
I grew up in Northern China, in a hometown changed by time and distance. Through prompting, storytelling, and hands-on editing, I recreated scenes that linger in me: recess, summer solitude, New Year warmth, while embracing GenAI quirks that reflect how memory distorts and softens.
Colors of As I Remember Them Generative Art
Design Interview about As I Remember Them Generative Art
The project was inspired by my desire to revisit childhood memories that have become increasingly distant over time. Rather than documenting the past literally, I wanted to reconstruct how those moments felt emotionally. Generative AI became a new medium through which I could explore memory, nostalgia, and imagination.
My main focus was to create AI assisted imagery that feels emotionally genuine rather than technically impressive. I wanted each piece to evoke a specific atmosphere and emotional connection, allowing viewers to recognize something familiar even if they have never experienced the exact places or moments depicted.
The generative models have already evolved significantly since I created this series. I'd like to revisit the medium with a completely new theme and explore how the latest AI capabilities can expand my creative process while continuing to prioritize personal storytelling over technical novelty.
Although the series was created over the course of about a month, the most intensive period lasted just over a week. Once I settled on the concept and discovered a workflow that consistently produced the visual style I was looking for, I became completely immersed in the project and spent hours each day developing the series.
This was a purely personal project that grew naturally out of my experimentation with generative art tools. It wasn't commissioned or created with commercial goals in mind. I simply wanted to explore whether AI could become a meaningful medium for expressing deeply personal memories.
I had seen many impressive examples of generative art, but very few that explored themes I personally connected with. That made me want to create something that felt more intimate and culturally specific, using the technology to tell a story that mattered to me rather than simply demonstrating its capabilities.
Much of my learning came from the MidJourney community, where creators generously shared prompting techniques and workflow discoveries. Studying those experiments helped me better understand how to control style, composition, and atmosphere while still leaving room for unexpected outcomes.
Rather than creating visually striking images for their own sake, this series aims to evoke genuine cultural and emotional connections. Because it was a personal project without commercial objectives, I had the freedom to focus entirely on expressing memory and atmosphere instead of optimizing for trends or audience expectations.
The title As I Remember Them reflects the imperfect nature of memory. The images are not intended to be exact reconstructions of the past, but interpretations shaped by time, emotion, and imagination. Just as memories preserve feelings more faithfully than details, the artwork focuses on emotional truth rather than literal accuracy.
The project was created primarily using MidJourney for image generation and Adobe Photoshop for post processing, compositing, and manual refinement. Combining AI generation with hands on editing allowed me to bring the final images closer to my creative vision.
Technology sits at the heart of this project. The series was born from my curiosity about the rapid advancement of generative AI and my desire to explore its creative potential. Rather than being the subject of the work, however, the technology serves as a medium for expressing memories and emotions.
One of the biggest challenges was that the AI models did not naturally understand many of the culturally specific scenes I wanted to depict. I often had to break memories into smaller visual elements, collect reference images, and refine prompts repeatedly before the results felt authentic.
I felt this project offered a perspective that was both personal and distinctive, and I wanted to share it with an international audience. An international design competition also provided an opportunity to see how people from different cultural backgrounds would respond to a story rooted in my own experiences.
The project taught me both the strengths and the limitations of generative AI. More importantly, it made me reflect on my own role as an artist and designer. I realized that while AI can generate countless images, it is still the human creator who gives the work its direction, meaning, and emotional authenticity.
Grand Interview about As I Remember Them Generative Art
The empty classroom is probably the image that best represents the emotional truth I was trying to capture. Interestingly, when I shared the series on Instagram, it received the most likes and reposts, which made me feel that the scene resonated with many people beyond my own experience.Most of the other pieces are rooted in places that still exist in some form. If I looked hard enough, I could probably still find an old factory, a Soviet influenced apartment building, or a village that resembles the places I remember. The classroom, however, is different. It is impossibly pristine, quiet, and almost heavenly. I have never actually seen a classroom like it. It exists entirely in my imagination, yet it somehow feels more truthful than a literal recreation. It represents not the physical space itself, but the way memory idealizes the past. Looking back, I realized I was not trying to reconstruct a real classroom, but the feeling of longing for a time in life that can never be revisited.
Much of today's AI generated imagery is created for commercial applications or simply for the novelty of the technology itself. It is far less common to see generative AI used as a medium for expressing deeply personal emotions in the way poetry, music, or painting often does. Creating As I Remember Them reinforced my belief that technology alone does not create emotional authenticity. AI was never the subject of this project; it was simply the medium.What ultimately gave the work meaning was not the algorithm, but the memories, cultural experiences, and emotions that guided every decision. The prompting, editing, and iteration were all in service of communicating something deeply human. The project changed the way I think about AI assisted creativity. Rather than replacing artistic expression, generative tools can become another language through which artists translate experiences that might otherwise be difficult to visualize. Soulfulness comes from intention, not from the tool itself.
One of the biggest technical challenges in this project was that AI image models had only a limited understanding of the everyday visual language of Northern China. I had to break memories into individual elements, collect reference images, and carefully guide the model toward scenes that felt culturally authentic. While this process will likely become much easier as future models learn from increasingly diverse visual data, I do not think that alone will make meaningful work.Technology will eventually be able to render almost any cultural setting convincingly. What will continue to distinguish one work from another is the artist's perspective: which memories are chosen, how they are interpreted, and what emotions they communicate. I hope this project encourages artists to use generative AI not simply to recreate places or cultures accurately, but to express the personal experiences and emotional nuances that give those places lasting meaning.
Receiving the Bronze A' Design Award is encouraging because it suggests that conversations around AI assisted creativity are becoming more nuanced. Early discussions often focused on technical capability or whether AI should be considered art at all. Increasingly, however, there is room to evaluate the ideas, emotions, and cultural narratives behind the work rather than the technology alone.I believe designers and artists are still discovering how to work alongside AI as it continues to evolve. Over time, these tools will likely become as ordinary as Photoshop or Figma, no longer the focus of attention but simply part of the creative process. What will remain constant is that design exists to communicate with people. As long as the work is driven by genuine human experiences and intentions, the technology becomes secondary. To me, this recognition signals that the design community is beginning to value AI assisted work for its human perspective, not just its technical novelty.
Working with AI's inherent randomness taught me that not every detail in an image carries the same weight. One of the biggest lessons was learning to distinguish between the non negotiable elements of a memory and the areas where I was willing to let the AI improvise. For example, in the New Year scene, I wanted the environment to unmistakably feel like Northern China rather than a generic interpretation of "Asian" or "Chinese." I had to be persistent, breaking the memory into specific architectural details, objects, and atmospheres until the model understood what I was asking for.That process unexpectedly deepened my own understanding of memory. Instead of remembering scenes only as vague feelings, I was forced to examine what actually made them feel authentic. AI became a catalyst for introspection, requiring me to translate emotions into concrete visual language. In doing so, I realized that memories are often built from surprisingly specific details, and preserving those details is what allows the emotional truth to survive.
MidJourney works through an iterative process. It begins by generating several very different directions, and each selection gradually narrows the results toward a more refined outcome. My role was less about waiting for the perfect image to appear and more about continuously steering the process.I usually transitioned to manual editing when I could see pieces of my vision scattered across multiple variations, even if no single image was complete. At that point, continuing to prompt became less efficient than assembling the strongest elements myself in Photoshop. Of course, this workflow was not always successful. There were many ideas that I pursued through countless prompts and carefully chosen references, only to realize that the model simply could not understand the scene I had in mind. Rather than forcing it, I learned to step away, abandon the concept, and return with a different approach. That balance between persistence and knowing when to let go became an essential part of the creative process.
The irregularities produced by AI generally fell into two categories. Some were obvious mistakes, such as extra fingers, distorted anatomy, or visually incoherent details, and those needed to be corrected. Others, however, felt more like happy accidents that unexpectedly strengthened the narrative.One example came from the empty classroom image. In one variation, MidJourney placed a few crumpled pieces of paper on a student's desk. They served no functional purpose, but I immediately knew they belonged. They introduced a quiet sense of human presence. Although the classroom is dreamlike and empty, those discarded papers suggest that someone was just there, and that they will return tomorrow. Details like these reminded me that memory is not perfectly organized or pristine. My guiding principle became simple: if an unexpected element deepened the emotional atmosphere or invited the viewer to imagine a story behind it, it deserved to stay. In those moments, the AI became less of a machine and more of a collaborator in visual storytelling.
Reminiscence has always been a recurring theme in my creative work, long before this project. Generative AI simply became another medium through which I could explore it. The technology may evolve rapidly, but my interest has always been in telling stories about memory, identity, and emotion.Looking ahead, I imagine designers becoming increasingly comfortable co creating with AI. Sometimes that may mean using AI to rapidly explore visual directions before completing the work manually. Other times, it may begin with a clear artistic vision expressed through sketches, references, and prompting, allowing AI to help realize that vision. In either case, I believe the designer must remain the creative mind behind the work. AI can accelerate execution and expand possibilities, but it cannot replace the human judgment that gives a story its purpose. The future of AI assisted storytelling will not be defined by what the technology can generate, but by what people choose to say with it.
When I first began experimenting with MidJourney, I was captivated by the sheer range of visual styles it could produce. Like many people, I spent time generating striking images simply to explore its capabilities. But after a while, the novelty wore off. The images were visually impressive, yet they often felt disconnected from one another and emotionally empty.The biggest lesson I learned was to stop treating prompts as the artwork itself and instead think of them as a way of creating raw material. I spent considerable time refining a combination of prompts, style parameters, and references that could consistently produce the atmosphere I wanted. Once that visual language was established, I could focus on what truly mattered: the story. My advice to other artists is to begin with something they genuinely want to express, rather than something they simply want to generate. A compelling visual style may attract attention, but it is the emotional intention behind the work that makes people remember it.
One aspect of generative art that I believe remains underexplored is how quickly people judge a work the moment they learn that AI was involved. I catch myself doing the same thing sometimes. The conversation often stops at the tool, rather than moving on to the questions that matter more: What is this work trying to say? Does it communicate something honest? Does it leave a lasting emotional impression?I believe audiences can ultimately sense the difference between work that is thoughtfully created and work that is generated with little intention. There will always be effortless, disposable AI imagery, just as there has always been forgettable work created with traditional tools. But there will also be artists who use AI with care, curiosity, and genuine creative purpose. As these tools become part of everyday practice, I hope we spend less time debating whether AI was used and more time discussing whether the work itself is meaningful. In the end, people rarely remember the brush or the camera. They remember the story that was told.