Ai Chink is a project that stages a collision between AI and the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. The title is intentionally abrasive: a linguistic short-circuit that exposes how Asian culture, philosophy, and labor are repeatedly reduced, exoticized, and consumed through Western systems of power—now accelerated by AI.
The project uses AI systems to generate music for each of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. At a technical level, both AI and the I Ching rely on controlled randomness. The casting of yarrow stalks or coins produces outcomes that are statistically arbitrary yet symbolically dense; machine-learning models generate outputs through probabilistic processes that feel uncanny, meaningful, or even prophetic. In both cases, humans read intention into noise. Meaning emerges not from certainty, but from interpretation.
Ai Chink points directly at the racialized gaze through which Asian culture is often consumed. “Chink” is not reclaimed here as empowerment; it is exposed as a wound that still structures how Asian bodies, ideas, and labor are perceived. The I Ching was never a mystical black box. It was a practical, philosophical tool embedded in daily life: a way to think through change, ethics, timing, and relationship. By contrast, AI is increasingly framed as an oracle—fetishized as unknowable, transcendent, and godlike. AI becomes the newest surface onto which old orientalist fantasies are projected—clean interfaces masking extractive systems underneath.
Those systems are not abstract. Contemporary AI is built on invisible labor: low-paid workers in the Asia cleaning and tagging datasets, moderating content —often performing repetitive, psychologically damaging tasks so that AI can appear seamless and intelligent. This labor is largely non-Western, yet its products are packaged, branded, and sold back to Western audiences as futuristic mystery. The colonial pattern persists: resource extraction, abstraction, and resale—this time not of spices or silk, but of attention, cognition, and culture.
In this context, Asian philosophy is flattened into aesthetic texture. Concepts like the I Ching, Zen, or Tao are stripped of historical specificity and lived practice, transformed into lifestyle signals for Western elitism—luxury spirituality, algorithmic enlightenment, mindfulness without material conditions. Asian daily life becomes content; Asian thought becomes vibe.
By mapping AI-generated music onto the 64 hexagrams, Ai Chink refuses resolution. The compositions do not claim spiritual authority or predictive truth. Instead, they sit in tension: between chance and control, reverence and parody, homage and critique. The work asks whether AI is truly new—or simply the latest apparatus through which power mystifies itself.
Ultimately, Ai Chink is less about divination than about exposure. It reveals how randomness is mistaken for wisdom, how technology inherits colonial logics, and how Asian culture is repeatedly rendered opaque so it can be consumed as exotic. The project does not offer clarity. Like the I Ching itself, it reflects the conditions of the moment—and asks the listener to confront what they bring to the act of interpretation.
CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 12/23/2025
Click on the Yin-Yang symbol in the center panel and a hexagram will be built line by line using the 3 coin toss method.
Once the hexagram is completed, the symbols associated with the hexagram will be displayed in the left panel whilst music generated by AI using the themes of the hexagram will play in the right panel (buttons in the left panel toggle between vocal / instrumental).
Click the small Yin-Yang symbol at the bottom of the center panel to generate another hexagram / reading.
Experience full-screen at: https://stephenchensf.com/aichink/
