Christopher Kulendran Thomas Is Imagining the Ghosts of the Future

For more than a decade, Christopher Kulendran Thomas has trained his own neural networks, building them from scratch before “AI art” was a widely used term. He feeds images of Sri Lankan painters across generations into his models, then uses them to produce new compositions that he and his Berlin studio hand-paint onto canvas. The titles are simply the auto-generated file names of the source PNGs. “The network analyzes the aggregated patterns behind their work,” the artist told me, slowly, so I could understand, at Gagosian’s Upper East Side location. “It learns a way of seeing.” Related Articles Gagosian Reunites With Richard Diebenkorn, Three Decades After Artist's Final Major Show Can Artists Find a Middle Ground Between Embracing and Rejecting AI? The result is painting that metabolizes colonial art history—the very visual grammar that redefined Sri Lanka after his Tamil family fled the civil war. “These are the only works that are historically specific,” he said, describe them as “the only ones where I’m explicit about what they are paintings of.” The subject matter for the Gagosian paintings, part of a series called “Peace Core,” is Mullivaikkal beach, which Kulendran Thomas described as “the most haunted place I’ve ever been.” In May 2009, as the Sri Lankan civil war reached its end, an estimated hundred thousand Tamil civilians were herded onto that narrow strip of sand—declared a safe zone—and then bombed. “No one knows how many people were killed that day,” he said quietly. “There were no witnesses. The United Nations had been forced to leave. Foreign journalists were banned.” The scenes of the massacre are imaged through the inherited language of Western painting—a language that, he said, “is an expression of the colonial history this is arguably a pretext for that violence in the first place.” Despite the subject matter, the works are luminous, even meditative. Their ambiguity—between horror and beauty, destruction and generation—is the emotional register Kulendran Thomas has fought to reach. “Back then I could only see things in black and white,” he said. “Now I can inhabit multiple positions in a very complex history.” That kind of statement is the sort often said by Kulendran Thomas, who is serious but never solemn, philosophical yet playful, a man who might turn up in a floor-length coat that could be worn either by a character from the The Matrix and a 18th-century poet. Kulendran Thomas’s work has been widely seen in Europe, including at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, where works from “Peace Core” were previously on view, and now he’s taking over New York. His Gagosian show, which closed earlier this month, was on view at the same time that his work was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art, which has plans to continue showing his 2019 video installation Being Human through 2027. Meanwhile, his work is set to soon appear in the New Museum’s reopening exhibition. The Gagosian show featured 6 paintings surrounding one central video installation. On one screen of the installation, an algorithm remixes footage from every major American TV channel between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001—the five-and-a-half minutes between the first plane hitting the North Tower and the moment the world realized what had happened. In the resulting footage, which includes no images of the explosion, morning shows collide with Britney Spears videos, and cereal ads combine with coverage of a runway show that flickers into an infomercial for toothpaste. “It feels like it’s from another world,” he said of the footage, which provides the “illusion that history had ended.” The video’s algorithm continually recombines the images with fragments of the day’s music, creating an infinite vaporwave-like soundtrack. Its editing logic, trained on TikTok’s corecore genre, keeps rearranging the past—proof that even nostalgia can be automated. The paintings surrounding the installation seem likewise trapped in the past: they appear modernist, even though they are new. “That uncanny valley of historical plausibility,” Kulendran Thomas said, “is another way into these paintings.” The MoMA installation, Being Human, is also an uncanny meditation on pop culture and art history. In it, Norwegian Tamil artist Ilavenil Jayapalan mulls over Western political philosophy and adroitly draws a line from Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge—which says we can only know reality based on our interpretation of it—to Duchamp’s idea of the readymade and what we now call contemporary art. Along the way, there are graceful digressions on human morality and the sticky problems of democracy. Then there’s a strikingly familiar blonde who may or may not be Taylor Swift (a convincing AI version of her, actually) who ponders the porous line between authenticity and simulation. There’s also a version of Oscar Murillo discussing how contemporary art by definition is unstuck in time. There’s even a pop song—with lyrics by a pre-GPT 3 algorthim and music production modeled on every song composer Max Martin worked on with Taylor Swift—that feels disturbingly plausible. “The tune’s good,” Kulendran Thomas said, laughing while standing outside his solo gallery at the MoMA. “But the lyrics are garbage. Still, it’s become one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs. Or at least in my top 10. And I’m a serious Swiftie.” Contrary to what you might expect, Kulendran Thomas is skeptical of most AI art. “It’s as boring as making paintings about paintbrushes,” he told me. What interests him is not the novelty of AI but its ubiquity— and the way perception itself changes once the machine’s logic becomes second nature. “At some point, no one will talk about these tools,” he said. “They’ll just be part of how we think.” When he speaks about his models, he sounds less like an engineer than a mystic. “I love it when people recognize things in my paintings that I didn’t know were there,” he said. “Because I’m not the ultimate source of everything—it’s channeling a network, a collective consciousness. You can try to control it, but you can’t. And that’s what’s most interesting.” The irony is that Kulendran Thomas’s critique of Western individualism is delivered through the painter’s hand, which modernists saw as an individual means of expression. Kulendran Thomas knows there’s a contradiction here. “Painting,” he said, “is the ultimate cultural expression of this particular fiction of what it means to be human.” “We’re the only civilization that defines for an entire species what it means to be human,” he continued. “Which is quite a scary way of being an empire.”