How Singaporean artist Wenhui Lim is using AI to reframe ageing, beauty and women’s invisible labour
In Singapore, nobody wants to be called an auntie.
The term has evolved far beyond its original meaning of an older female relative. It has become a label, often applied to women perceived as old-fashioned, blunt or out of touch. In everyday conversation, an auntie can be a person, an attitude, even an item of interior design. Yet for Singaporean artist Wenhui Lim, who works under the moniker niceaunties, the figure of the auntie represents something very different.
Speaking at Upscale Conf in San Francisco, Lim described how years of observing the women around her led to the creation of the auntieverse, a parallel world in which aunties become the central characters. Beneath the humour, absurdity and visual spectacle of the project lies a quietly subversive idea: the rehabilitation of a figure that has long been underestimated.
aunties are very clever and funny
“Having grown up surrounded by women in my family, I know that auntie is so much more than that,” she explains. “She is resourceful and misunderstood, and also very clever and funny.”
The auntieverse is populated by women who do laundry, complain, gossip, feed their families, dispense unsolicited advice and somehow manage to hold communities together. Lim speaks affectionately of the contradictions embodied by the auntie. The same woman who tells you that you have gained weight will immediately insist that you eat more. She is caring and critical, supportive and exasperating, practical and deeply emotional.
Rather than rejecting those contradictions, Lim embraces them. “Most of all I wanted to reframe the idea of the auntie,” she says.
auntieverse
That act of reframing sits at the heart of her artistic practice. Over the past several years, the auntieverse has expanded across AI-generated film, photography, sculpture, augmented reality and large-scale installations. Her work has appeared in Times Square, on Sunset Boulevard, at Shibuya Crossing, on Oxford Street in London and at exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and North America. Yet despite the increasingly sophisticated technology involved, the themes remain remarkably consistent.
One recurring project explores plastic consumption, inspired by memories of growing up surrounded by plastic bags, food containers and the disposable materials that quietly shape everyday life. Some of the earliest works were created in 2023 and later enhanced using Magnific, allowing Lim to revisit the same ideas through increasingly sophisticated visual tools. Yet while the technology has evolved, the underlying concerns have remained unchanged.
“Every year I’ll revisit the theme again and again,” she says. “You can see how the technology of AI improved and changed, but the narrative stays the same.”
That observation is particularly striking at a time when so much discussion around artificial intelligence focuses on technical capability. Lim approaches AI differently. For her, the technology is valuable because it allows her to express ideas more fully, not because it supplies the ideas themselves.
Impact of AI on creatives
“I love creating with AI because it brings me back to the same level of energy and excitement like I was a child,” she explains, before adding that without the memories and experiences accumulated over a life time, she could not create the work at all.
Those memories surface repeatedly throughout the auntieverse. They emerge in stories about ageing and beauty, in humorous observations about family life and in explorations of the changing role of women within society. They also appear in one of the most moving sections of her presentation, which focused on her grandmother.
Lim spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in a working-class neighbourhood of Singapore. A fishmonger’s wife and mother of eight children, she rarely left the home. Her days were spent cooking, cleaning, serving the family and making fish balls. Like countless women of her generation, she devoted her life to unpaid domestic labour.
What struck Lim most was how little evidence of that life remained. “We had no documentation of that sort, no photos, no videos,” she recalled.
No records
The absence is telling. Entire generations of women’s lives were spent performing essential work that was rarely recorded, celebrated or preserved. Through a film entitled Goddess, Lim sought to address that omission. Drawing on Chinese mythology, she transformed the domestic worker into a goddess figure, not as an act of fantasy but as a form of recognition.
The work challenges conventional ideas about whose stories deserve to be remembered. While mythology has traditionally celebrated warriors, rulers and heroes, Lim’s Goddess asks whether the women who sustained families and communities might also deserve a place in the narrative.
A similar impulse informs her exploration of beauty and ageing. The auntie, as Lim notes, has rarely been associated with beauty, fashion or aspiration. Yet contemporary conversations around longevity, menopause and body image are beginning to challenge those assumptions. Through sculptures, digital installations and AI-generated imagery, she reimagines older women not as figures of decline but as participants in evolving definitions of beauty and identity.
The result is art that feels both playful and political. Lim rarely lectures her audience. Instead, she invites them into worlds populated by giant auntie underwear, talking mirrors, jellyfish cities and cat-faced aunties. The humour disarms.
Perhaps that is why the auntieverse resonates so widely across cultures. Although rooted in Singaporean experience, its central concerns are universal. Every society contains figures whose contributions are taken for granted. Every family contains stories that remain untold. Every culture creates labels that diminish certain people while elevating others.
By reclaiming the auntie, Wenhui Lim is doing more than creating memorable characters. She is challenging assumptions about ageing, visibility and value, while using the newest technologies available to tell some of the oldest stories imaginable.
The tools may be contemporary, but the project itself is timeless: an effort to ensure that women whose lives have often been overlooked are finally seen.
