Lately, the emergence of generative AI has led me to question the value of fiction. Why invent stories when a machine can do it?
Usually, I imagine the stories and situations I draw, but for this show, I’ve decided to make an exception.
I gathered images from all corners of the internet online shopping stores, private photos, Instagram reels, painting reproductions, and more and attempted to replicate them. The common thread between these images was that I was drawn to them, each for different reasons.
All my renderings were hand-drawn using the same technique, aiming to replicate the originals as closely as my drawing skills allowed.
Once copied, regardless of whether the original was a painting or a photograph, public or private, fictional or non-fictional, they all seemed to belong to the same fictional world.
Stephen Vuillemin was born in 1986 in Besançon, Stephen Vuillemin is an animation director, comic book author, and illustrator. In 2011, his webcomic Lycéennes, described by Cartoon Brew as a "novel use of animated GIFs," gained widespread recognition and was featured in Vice, Wired, and other media outlets. His first animated short film, A Kind of Testament, premiered at the 2023 Berlinale and went on to win more than 40 international awards at festivals such as Zagreb Animafest, Fantoche Baden, and Go Shorts Nijmegen. In 2024, he contributed to the Tokyo exhibition “Touch on an Absence” alongside Japanese artist Tabaimo. The same year, he published two books: “Les Nourritures Extraterrestres”, a comic book, and “Le Bonhomme”, a children's book. Vuillemin has also worked with Chanel, Stone Island, The New York Times, GQ Magazine, and Arte. Previously based in London and Taipei, he now divides his time between the French Jura, Paris, and Tokyo.
