Shavonne Wong is something of a pioneer in Singapore’s art scene. The digital artist and Singapore native prizes adaptability and creativity, qualities which have served her well across the transformation of digital art. When the wave of generative artificial intelligence and NFTs first swept across the art world a few years ago, many remained sceptical—would the bubble soon pop? Wong, though, dove headfirst into this vast new cyber-frontier, establishing Singapore’s first ever virtual modelling agency and designing NFTs that caught the attention of collectors like Idris Elba. Her art seamlessly blends the human with the digital, and in her latest endeavour, she turns a critical eye on the age of the algorithm using the very tools that define it—and the work finds its centre in a 400-year-old classic.
With her most recent exhibition, After Ophelia, the Singapore native and 2024 GRAZIA Game Changer asks what identity means in an age defined by algorithms. Displayed at the Artverse Gallery in Paris, the exhibition centred on Shakespeare’s tragic heroine Ophelia. For centuries, the character has been analysed, romanticised, and sometimes entirely overwritten by the layers of commentary that surround her (which now include among them a hit pop song that sees Taylor Swift put herself in Ophelia’s shoes.) As Wong notes, “[Ophelia] spoke fewer than [400] words in Hamlet, yet has been defined by centuries of other people’s descriptions.”
This gap between voice and representation resonated with Wong on a personal level. She recalls once Googling herself and discovering a mix of outdated information and outright errors, which over time were repeated, archived, and eventually regurgitated by AI systems. “That experience led me to Ophelia,” she says—another woman shaped more by others’ words than her own.”
After Ophelia unfolded as a two-part digital installation. Ophelia, Retold featured a gravelly, AI-generated voice reading aloud a collage of opinions and descriptions about Ophelia, stitched together from four centuries of text. Shakespearean lines flowed into feminist theory, which in turn glided into the words of anonymous commenters on Reddit threads, all intoned by an uncanny computer-generated voice. The effect is both humorous and unsettling, highlighting how easily narratives blur when filtered through technology.
Ophelia, Reassembled shifted the focus to image. Here, Wong distorted and rebuilt Ophelia’s likeness using 3D processes and AI tools, resulting in a single-channel video that highlighted the messy process as much as the end result. “The meshes, the digital artifacts, the moments where the illusion breaks—these aren’t flaws but evidence,” Wong explains. “They show that every image of Ophelia is constructed, that authenticity was never an option.”
Wong’s cyber-surrealist aesthetic gives the work a dreamlike quality, but the questions it raises feel sharply contemporary. After Ophelia offers a refreshingly nuanced take on a debate surrounding artificial intelligence that has often been oversimplified into two camps: ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. Wong’s work eludes categorisation, acknowledging both the creative potential and the structural pitfalls of algorithmic tools. It invites us to consider how identity is shaped, reshaped, and sometimes distorted by the voices that claim to define it.
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