A recreation of traditional Korean folk painting in the eyes of an AI
Rick Kim
Description
The project is a recreation of a Minhwa painting called “The Tiger and the Crow” using a styleGAN2 model – a creation of a neural-net styled version of Minhwa painting.
Minhwa (민화) is a traditional Korean folk painting that has a unique feature that the painter is, most of the time, anonymous. Minhwa can be drawn by anyone. However, as many traditions get lost over time, the production of Minhwa paintings have been diminishing since the early industrialization era. Despite the current efforts to revive the tradition, it is slowly being lost as new generation steps away from folk paintings.
If everyone can be a Minhwa painter, I thought of a notion that an AI can also be an anonymous painter – an AI as an anonymous creator in order to pay respect to the long tradition of Minhwa creations. Through this project, I wanted to emphasize that anyone can be a Minhwa painter regardless of who you are. When even an AI can be a Minhwa painter, why can't you be one?
Although the product of this particular machine learning model seem odd and “imperfect” compared to the many Minhwas drawn by famous artists, the imperfection of the created painting portrays the essence of what folk paintings are – I am not striving to create a perfect folk painting, but a statement to the community that there is no “perfect” Minhwa.
The project involves using StyleGAN2, a machine learning model that creates similar styled images using a given training dataset images, as the main component. I was able to collect approximately 500 different Minhwa images with various styles, and trained on top of an existing pre-trained model to expedite the process.