The world of Niceaunties now

This write-up is for those of you who have no clue what ‘Niceaunties’ actually is and why you’re seeing it pop up everywhere, for the people that have known this art project for a while now but would like to take a closer look at what’s been going on over the past years, for the AI curious, and also just for anybody that’s interested in crazy creative and weirdly funny works of art. Welcome to the world of Niceaunties.

At a glance

Niceaunties is a Singapore-based artist and designer whose ongoing world-building project reimagines the cultural figure of the “auntie” through art made with AI and mixed with other media. In this article, I want to give you an overview of how the project began, how it developed from 2023 through 2025, and which direction it’s heading towards.

Key information:

→ Began while she was still working in architecture, as “a conscious process of unlearning and deprogramming.”

→ Uses memory, fantasy, humour, and reframing to “find my voice and critique the world around me.”

→ The ‘Auntieverse’ has moved from online platforms to public spaces with exhibitions, installations, and physical objects.

→ The work has started to enter academic discourse through writing on ageing and AI.

→ Key milestones include a TED Talk (2024), a West Hollywood billboard commission (2024), a residency and installation in Uruguay (2024), and a motion-capture mirror work for Paris Photo (2025).

How it began

Niceaunties describes the start of her art practice as a change in how she learned to inhabit her own life. Looking back at the beginning, she says it was “very much part of my journey of self-discovery and becoming more visible.” Because first, for more than twenty years, she worked in architecture; a field in which she was used to working within constraints. She also grew up in what she calls “a rule-based, highly structured Asian society where discipline, efficiency, and economic stability are prioritised over individual expression.”

Looking at the Auntieverse, this feels like a place where she didn’t have any constraints: a universe of possibilities. “Developing Niceaunties became a conscious process of unlearning and deprogramming,” she says. It wasn’t simply having to learn new software or adopting a new aesthetic, but it was most of all “breaking free from internalized constraints and allowing fantasy and humor to become tools for finding my voice and critiquing the world around me.” At first, the project ran alongside her architectural life. Nearly three years later, she has transitioned to creating Niceaunties full time.

Why aunties

In many Asian societies, “auntie” is both a familial title and a social label – affectionate, neutral, loving, or pejorative depending on who says it, and how. It can imply age, taste, class position, temperament, and a presumed lack of sophistication. It can also imply competence, resilience, bluntness, and a kind of care that doesn’t sound like care to an outsider. “There's two sides to an auntie: on the one hand, they embody familial love – but this love is often tinged with sharp, unsolicited opinions. For example, they’ll say something like, 'Why are you still single?' or 'You look fat,' and then they’ll feed you a lot of food. It’s contradictory – tough love is the only way they know how to express it.”

Beyond family, anyone – whether related or not – can be called an “auntie”, often serving as shorthand for someone perceived as old-fashioned, rigid, or overly critical. In her work, Niceaunties reclaims and reinvents this term, presenting these women not as symbols of rigid social expectations but as vibrant, empowered figures, free to pursue joy without the limitations of societal judgment. “My art is about creating a world where women feel free and empowered to be outrageous, joyful, and unrestrained.”

Why AI

For Niceaunties, AI serves as a creative partner. Her process often begins with a broad theme in mind, and as she uses a variety of different AI programs to generate imagery, she allows the process to flow organically. “The AI’s unexpected contributions often give rise to new ideas, shaping the final outcome in ways I couldn’t have predicted.”

The emotional impact of creating these works is also quite significant for the artist, who finds the process very therapeutic. "Creating images and videos in the (still growing) AI community is one of the most mind and soul-liberating activities," she says. The rapid feedback loop that AI allows is part of what makes the creative act so satisfying for her – enabling a depth of constant exploration that traditional media would make time-prohibitive.

Stylistically, Niceaunties draws from surrealism and kawaii culture, blending comical aesthetics with cultural references that evoke both humor and nostalgia, through which she can travel endlessly. Her art is filled with layers of meaning, hidden symbols and objects waiting to be discovered, with her wanting each work to be as interesting as possible to ensure that the pieces can be revisited over and over again – offering something new upon each viewing.

The Auntieverse, year by year

Niceaunties’ timeline, from early experiments to a first coherent world, and from still imagery to projects that leave the screen and enter public space.

2023: early explorations

The idea for Niceaunties began early in 2023, catalyzed by the artist's encounter with Midjourney. “Being able to express myself through creating art almost instantaneously became addictive.” This newfound creative power enabled her to explore issues close to her heart, especially those related to her cultural background and family.

Her work was shaped through themes of food and aunties’ social life, moving in tandem with the development of publicly available AI platforms and models. July 2023 was a turning point, when RunwayML’s image-to-video model was released, and she began exploring animated narratives.

In September 2023, she had her first release with Fellowship for Daily, which she describes as “an experimental video work made using AI.” In October 2023, she then also had her first solo show online, titled 4x4 Soft Rebellion.

2024: visibility

In February 2024, she exhibited at Zona Maco and released the first Auntieverse collection with Fellowship: “the culmination of studies in 10 chapters of the previous year.” In April, she staged a solo show in Berlin: Auntiedote, with EXPANDED.ART.

That same month, she delivered a TED Talk in Vancouver, an experience she calls “defining.” Presented live to an audience of 1,700 people, it was not only about public speaking; “it was about “choosing to become more visible at a time of heightened anti-AI sentiment.” Distilling an entire year of research, experimentation, and world-building into a tight arc of eleven minutes was a good challenge. “Through that process I learned more about clarity and felt the overall responsibility that comes with visibility. The experience reshaped how I communicate my work and its values and remains a genuinely life-changing milestone.”

From June through September 2024, the Auntieverse moved into the city: Aunties on Sunset appeared as a billboard commission in West Hollywood, commissioned by the city. Later that year, she undertook an art residency in Uruguay and produced Aunties in Dis Place.

Besides that, Auntlantis was chosen as a Lumen Prize finalist (Impact category).

2025: beyond the screen

In 2025, the pace became more international and the context widened:

• February: AI Action Summit, Paris

• May: OFFF Barcelona

• May: Brand partnership with SWATCH

• May–June: solo show Auntieverse at MGArtspace, Beijing 798

• June: L’Oréal collaboration with an ‘Auntie sculpture’, Paris

• September: W1 Curates, Oxford Street, London

• November: Presentation at IdeaFest, Jakarta, with SILK & Mirror Into Auntieverse at Paris Photo

2025 also saw two new Lumen Prize finalist selections: Aunties in Dis Place (Culture category) and Goddess (Moving Image category).

Across these years, she frames the development as an expansion of form and audience: the Auntieverse “evolving from something purely digital into something much more expansive and physical.” It started on social media, moved into web3, “and gradually into real-world spaces, exhibitions, public artworks, and installations.” Alongside that, the scope of her public role expanded into speaking engagements across countries, engaging institutions as well as general audiences, and reaching people “outside of art and tech circles.”

More recently, she notes the work entering academic discourse: “a PhD student has published a thesis on ageing and AI using the Auntieverse as a case study,” which she describes as “unexpected but meaningful validation.” For her, it reinforced that the Auntieverse is being understood “not just as content, but as a sustained artistic practice with wider social and intellectual impact.”

Two anchor works

Certain works stand out not only as technical milestones, but because “they mark important moments in the bigger auntie agenda.”

1. Goddess

“Goddess is an esoteric two minute narrative about a divine being who lives as an ordinary woman on Earth, slowly losing herself to endless domestic rituals until she awakens, leaves, and realises her human life was only an illusion.” It was made during SORA’s beta testing phase and for the artist it was the first time she used text-to-video “to build a realistic, culturally specific story inspired by my late grandmother’s life.” The emotional charge of the process is central: “Recreating memories of her and turning them into something poetic and playful made the process deeply personal. It will always hold a special place in my heart.”

2. The Auntie sculpture

The ‘Auntie sculpture’ was created in collaboration with Valter Adam Casotto and Fisheye Immersive for L’Oréal’s private Beauty of Longevity event in June 2025. Niceaunties describes it as a major shift, really moving out of the screen and seeing an Auntieverse idea materialise in three dimensions. “Not long ago, I feel the ‘auntie’ stereotype would never have been associated with evolving ideas of beauty,” she reflects. For her, the work represents a meaningful paradigm shift towards a definition of beauty that goes beyond youth and Western-centric ideals, with the sculpture not having or wanting to redefine beauty, but staging an auntie as someone whose presence belongs - just as much - inside the beauty discourse.

Exhibitions

Two exhibition projects help clarify how the Auntieverse behaves when it operates as a physical encounter instead of through a digital interface.

1. Aunties in Dis Place (Uruguay, 2024)

Aunties in Dis Place was created during a month-long residency in Pueblo Garzón, a remote village in Uruguay. The residency brought together thirteen artists and architects to immerse themselves in local culture and produce work for an art festival. The theme was displacement and movement. “Spending a full month in such a remote location was very confronting for me,” she says, with it being the first time working in this residency format.

As her site of intervention, she was given an abandoned house. Working with a local auntie seamstress, she ended up creating “gigantic pieces of auntie lingerie, hung outside the house like laundry, as a playful yet unmistakable announcement of the aunties’ presence in the village.” Inside the house, she projected digital works across multiple layers of hanging laundry, allowing visitors to walk through translucent layers before reaching the central video installation. That final work depicted imaginary aunties ‘invading’ the village, which was “part surreal fiction, part diary documenting my emotional responses, observations, and sense of displacement during that month.”

She describes it as a technical and conceptual threshold: her first time inserting artificial aunties into real photographs and physical settings, something that in 2024 “was still relatively rare” and pushed the limits of her tools. It was also eye-opening for her to see how people from another culture responded, and “how the aunties themselves seemed to adapt to a new environment.”

2. Mirror Into Auntieverse (Paris Photo, 2025)

Mirror Into Auntieverse switched things up by centering on how aunties look at you – and what it feels like to be seen by them.

The work was shown during Paris Photo in November 2025 and featured an antique 19th-century Napoleon III mirror reimagined with motion capture and real-time rendering, produced in collaboration with LOAD Gallery. “While the concealed camera did not always function as intended and was at times switched off, the aunties always remained,” she recalls. “Their large faces appear to you on the mirror screen, echoing the fairy-tale motif of “mirror, mirror on the wall...”

The encounter the visitors could get is rooted in what Niceaunties calls ‘the auntie love language’: affection expressed through critique, with brutally unapologetic honesty, but also a touch of humor. The piece gave you exactly that: remarks about appearance, status, choices, or life progress, “which are often seen as unloving and rude but are actually intentional as a form of love. Like said before, this is the only way they know how to show it.”

Accompanying the mirror were thirteen animated auntie portraits, each scripted with a line reflecting a different facet of this love language. These works were released as 1/1 video artworks on Tezos, alongside informal framed prints inspired by black-and-white studio portraits her mother took with her friends in the 1970s. This recent project formed another step in Niceaunties’ quest to understand and preserve auntie culture, while bringing it into a public, large-scale photographic context.

Partnerships

In the Auntieverse, partnerships are great opportunities to test whether the world-building logic can stretch into other cultural platforms. Besides the L’Oréal collaboration with an ‘Auntie sculpture’, another standout is SWATCH: JellyCity.

In collaboration with SWATCH, Niceaunties developed a narrative artwork in response to the launch of a scuba diving watch inspired by jellyfish. At the time, she was already building ‘JellyCity’ as part of the Auntieverse, so the alignment “felt like a natural synchronicity.”

The collaboration resulted in the creation of a new district within JellyCity, “a playful, time-themed environment where two jellyfish fall in love and give birth to baby SWATCH watches.” This was a perfect example of blending brand storytelling with speculative world-building, allowing the product to exist organically within the narrative logic of the artists’ universe.

What’s changed the most

Across the timeline, Niceaunties repeatedly returns to one larger arc: the work is moving from the digital-native conditions that helped it form, toward more complex translations into physical space, institutions, and different kinds of publics. And this expansion isn’t just material: her practice also involves speaking publicly in different countries more and more, engaging with institutions and general audiences, and reaching people outside art and tech circles.

There was also the conceptual change in the way the work is being received, with her project entering academic discourse through a thesis on ageing and AI using the Auntieverse as a case study. Overall, she is now “much more at ease with being visible and people knowing who I am.” Over the past years, she has learned to stay focused on her own path and not let external noise affect her too much. “What I love most is the joy that comes from creating aunties and building this world.”

What still surprises her, though, is how much the world hasn’t caught up with the potential of AI as a creative tool. “I feel there’s still a lot of dismissal without real understanding.” She is out there to show the world that these tools are legitimate, and that ‘becoming old in your own way’ is also legitimate in a culture that struggles to imagine ageing women as central subjects (seeing them more as side characters).

Where it’s headed

Niceaunties’ own examples point to a clear direction to build on further: from digital to physical, screen to object, feed to installation, archetype to interface, passive to interactive. Where Aunties in Dis Place was about inserting artificial aunties into real photographs and a real village, and Mirror Into Auntieverse was about turning auntie ‘critique’ (= love) into an interactive encounter, and the L’Oréal sculpture was about seeing an Auntieverse idea materialise in three dimensions, then ‘where it’s headed’ seems to be a practice of different iterations and migrations.

The aunties are staying, that’s for sure, but the contexts will keep changing: from billboard to museum to mirror to sculpture to brand narrative to academic citation. What holds it together is not the tool - AI is just a medium and not the message - and it’s also not a visual signature. Overall, it’s the underlying insistence that aunties and their ‘auntie culture’ – being blunt, caring, funny, and complicated all at the same time – are worth preserving, worth looking at for what they are, and worth projecting into futures that usually write them out.

Perhaps that’s the project’s most consistent wager: that new technologies don’t only offer new looks, but most of all offer a chance to reorder cultural attention – to decide, again and again, who gets to be seen, and on what terms. This is the world of Niceaunties, and it’s here to stay.