FAce-lIft Continuation XXIII: Awanqi

INSTALLATION LOG // >
Exhibit Entry Twenty-Two Distortion Dialogue

At first glance, Awanqi’s work is beautiful — lush, delicate, dripping in pastel and blood. But stare too long, and you’ll feel something shift. The bodies are too soft. The eyes too knowing. The scenes too still. Like something just happened, or is about to.

Awanqi (Qi Awan) was born in China and raised in Singapore. She studied fashion and illustration, but her real education came from the internet. She carved out a space entirely her own — far from Western galleries, far from AI polish, far from anything that could be called safe. Her art doesn’t posture. It lingers.

She draws on a long line of East Asian visual culture — not to reproduce it, but to twist it. Fox spirits, moon girls, demon queens — her subjects aren’t mythological so much as mythic. They exist outside of time, gender, gravity. They are beautiful in the way that grief is beautiful. That rot is beautiful. That survival is beautiful.

Her style is unmistakable: dreamy, distorted, drenched in light and shadow. She works digitally, mostly in Photoshop, layering custom brushes and hand-painted textures to mimic the bleed of watercolour and the crackle of old ink. The result is painterly and high-gloss, like a fever dream printed on silk.

What makes Awanqi’s work sing isn’t just the aesthetic — it’s the gaze. Her characters aren’t being looked at. They’re looking back. Their expressions are unreadable. Their bodies curve like question marks. Her compositions lean into absence — huge fields of negative space surrounding a single figure in a state of becoming or undoing. Her women — if that’s even what they are — are often in flux: shedding, sprouting, unravelling.

She once said she was interested in “moments of collapse — where beauty becomes grotesque.” You can feel that in every piece. Fingers morph into petals. Blood becomes silk. Pain becomes fashion. These aren’t just portraits; they’re rituals

She resists AI aesthetics not just in practice, but in principle. Her work refuses clarity. It refuses mass appeal. It’s rooted in cultural specificity, emotional ambiguity, and deliberate discomfort. You’re not meant to consume it. You’re meant to feel a little haunted by it.

There’s a particular rebellion in choosing softness — not as fragility, but as force. Her figures are femme, but not passive. They are full of agency, rage, quiet pride. In a digital art world obsessed with spectacle and trend, Awanqi’s work is deeply personal. It bleeds.

I remember the first time I saw one of her pieces — a girl with tears running upwards, her dress folding into bone, her expression unreadable. I didn’t know what it meant, but I couldn’t stop looking. It didn’t ask to be understood. It just existed. Like a ghost in high resolution.

.

AI can replicate her palette. It can guess at her brushstrokes. But it will never understand the grief ritual tucked into the fold of a silk sleeve. The ancestral echo in a half-drawn fox ear. The way her girls hold eye contact — daring, defiant, divine.

Awanqi doesn’t create for the feed. She creates for the ones who know what it feels like to shapeshift to survive.

And that, still, can’t be generated.

Prompt+Original

Paint a haunting, expressionist-style portrait of a bald, androgynous figure with wide, spiraled eyes and an unsettling stare. The face is rendered in thick, textured brushstrokes of muted purples and greens, with blotches of lavender, lilac, and pale chartreuse blending together to form a ghostly complexion. The background is a distorted field of vertical strokes in sickly yellows, murky greens, and streaks of red-orange that resemble both flame and hair, giving the figure a surreal, almost supernatural aura. The nose appears smudged or bruised, and the mouth is slightly ajar, dark and off-center, as if mid-thought or mid-scream. The overall mood is tense, uncanny, and intimate — like catching someone in the middle of remembering something they shouldn’t have.

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