Ted Chin creates beautiful surreal photoshopped art.

December 19, 2023 7:37 AM

Artist Ted Chin has his surreal digital art on tedslittledream.com and his instagram. He has been featured in mymodernmet.com (not affiliated with the MET), 121clicks.com, and was interviewed last month for forbes.com.
posted by AlSweigart (15 comments total)

Please actually look through Chin's art pieces and read the interview before commenting. I'd like to have a conversation about Chin's art specifically, rather than retread the usual AI-generated art discourse.

This is not a post about AI-generated art, because Ted Chin's art is not generated by AI.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:37 AM on December 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I like the cat-on-power-lines-with-giant-fish-in-the-sky piece for the Night in the Woods vibes it gives me when Mae (an anthropomorphic cat) is walking around town and having her dream sequences.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:52 AM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is not a post about AI-generated art, because Ted Chin's art is not generated by AI.

It's an unfortunate sign of the times that we even need to have a disclaimer like this on an art post. To my eye, this is clearly the work of human hands, because I can see an actual point of view and an inspired, playful mind behind these expertly-done visual juxtapositions, not just lines of code optimized to mash everything in some haphazardly-selected training corpus into a fine artlike paste.

Thank you for sharing this, AlSweigart!
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:54 AM on December 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

archive link just in case ...
posted by philip-random at 8:01 AM on December 19, 2023

The juxtapositions when you put his pieces side-by-side can be as strange as the items he's composing together in the individual pieces. You see a cherry-blossom elk wading through the ocean before an impossible supermoon, very dreamy, very pretty...and then a person in a vast empty waste, considering a noose that hangs invitingly from heaven; giant cliffs suggest the call of the void, although whether you would fall into clouds or stinging but welcoming jellyfish depends on the picture. There's a danger lurking--or a sense of death and decay--strangely at odds with how dreamy everything is, like a mind lightly wandering through every possible topic, light or dark, with the same partly-cloudy touch.
posted by mittens at 8:24 AM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

They remind me of the images you get when playing Canvas, a boardgame where you create pictures using transparencies.
posted by donio at 9:18 AM on December 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

a cherry-blossom elk wading through the ocean before an impossible supermoon

That could be the cover art for a Southern Reach novel.
posted by kjs3 at 1:16 PM on December 19, 2023

I expect surrealism to at least be disturbing or thought-provoking, and I'm not sensing that here. What am I missing?
posted by Vegiemon at 1:34 PM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I agree, Vegiemon. This is fun, and some of it is pretty, but surrealism needs something a little more uncanny.
posted by PussKillian at 1:56 PM on December 19, 2023

It's never entirely clear in any of the artist statements or interviews, but my assumption is that he's using stock photography for a lot of this. And it's cool that he can manipulate stock photos to make them into interesting things, but I'm not certain it's wildly different or more interesting as a process than an AI doing the same thing.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:57 PM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find these to be quite bland; technically they are extremely well done, but they feel like illustration more than anything, they have a real 1970s sci-fi quality to them; that elephant bestriding the mountains is lifted right out of Roger Dean's work from the period.
There doesn't seem to be anything beyond the surface whereas the best surrealist art had, and has, a resonance and depth that made it very engaging.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 12:32 AM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

To me they are 90s dorm room posters, but hey, I'm all for that
posted by away for regrooving at 1:08 AM on December 20, 2023

Chin has an eye, and some of his work is really arresting. I personally quite enjoyed looking at this image, starting with the tree and moving to the pleasant shock of seeing the context.

To add to what others have said, Chin is working in both a style and a medium that has been wildly popular for decades. He has a lot of competition, in terms of past, current, and future work. I hope that he can move into installations and immersive exhibits, as he seems interested in doing, as those are somewhat fewer and farther between than "surreal photo manipulation on a website," and I think he could do some neat work in that space. I like the Portuguese man-o-wars in the clouds, but that stuff really is a dime a dozen and has been poster fodder for decades. It would be nice to see where he's taken his work in 20 years.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:20 PM on December 20, 2023

One of his pieces reminds me a lot of the alien communication scenes from the movie Arrival [FanFare/spoilers], and the better ones evoke that sense of simultaneous wonder and a smidgen of awe bordering on terror--cool, it's a giant stag, but I hope it doesn't notice me. Yeah, a lot of it is very dorm poster-y, but at least it's a bit more creative than yet another poster of a Lamborghini or a woman in her underwear holding a saxophone or whatever (you can probably tell that i went to college in the 80s).
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:53 PM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Thanks for making this post, it's been added to the Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 8:23 AM on December 21, 2023