Into the Auntieverse: an artwork on the life of older women Singapore+ photos

Into the Auntieverse: There are high-rise living quarters built from stacks of Tupperware, spas where you can immerse yourself in a giant bowl of ramen and an altar where you can pay your respects to the Supreme Perm Goddess.

Welcome to Auntieverse, a world built by, and ruled by aunties, filled with everything aunties love.

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Into the Auntieverse

Into the Auntieverse: The project, by the Singaporean AI artist Niceaunties, is a surreal celebration of the “auntie culture” that exists across south-east and east Asia. As well as being shared widely online, her images have been auctioned at Christie’s and Phillips, and featured at exhibitions across London, Paris and Seoul.

Into the Auntieverse: The work sets out to challenge perceptions of aunties. “For my generation at least nobody likes to be called an auntie because it means that you are old. You’re ageing,” says Niceaunties, who uses an alias. “I was trying to reframe the perspective and trying to make it fun.”

Across the region, auntie doesn’t refer only to someone who has nieces and nephews, but is also used as a broader term for older women. There are negative connotations to this – according to stereotypes, they are known for giving unsolicited comments or asking unwanted questions (“You’ve gained weight” and “When are you getting married?”).

“It’s a wide spectrum of behaviour from being really nurturing, kind and feeding you lots of food, to being really mean – insulting you the moment they see you,” says Niceaunties.

“I was trying to understand what it meant [to be an auntie] by making art and showing this behaviour through my art,” she says.

Into the Auntieverse: The project was inspired by the older women in her own family, including her grandmother, who was born in Singapore in the early 1930s. She didn’t have the chance to access proper education, and worked on a rubber plantation from an early age, before entering an arranged marriage and going on to have eight children.

“Her entire life, she was at home. I had never seen her leave the family home,” Niceaunties says. “When my parents were working I grew up with my grandmother and the unmarried siblings of my mother – every day she was doing laundry, she was cooking for the family,” she recalls.

Into the Auntieverse: Her grandmother lived with dementia for the last 20 years of her life and was bedridden. “I remember when I was a child she had a lot of emotions, but she had nobody to talk to,” she adds, recalling seeing her grandmother cry.

Into the Auntieverse: Through her artwork, Niceaunties aspires to imagine “a different kind of life and unbridled freedom” for this generation of women.

In the Auntieverse, aunties dance in sequined outfits on the beach, pose with giant vegetables, and attend Nasa, (the Nice Aunties Sushi Academy), a cooking school located on the moon, where aunties undergo training, under the watchful eye of a giant cat.

Acronyms are a common feature in the Auntieverse (a nod to Singapore’s love of abbreviations), as are puns. You can ride a tofu-engineered sushi luxury auto (a Tesla), a transportation method that is made from tofu and sushi, and powered by legs. It’s based on wordplay: in the Chinese Hokkien dialect, the word for “leg” sounds the same as the English word for “car”, says Niceaunties.

“It’s the same sound, so my aunties always joke that they can’t afford a vehicle but they can have their own cars to pick them up,’ she says.

Into the Auntieverse: The artwork also deals with bleaker themes, such as loneliness, isolation and environmental destruction. One series, Auntlantis, portrays the plastic pollution crisis. Here, fishes have adapted to thrive on the plastics and have grown huge in size. An auntie reminisces about a time when the world was clean.

Niceaunties, who is also an architectural designer, works with AI to generate images, using tools such as Midjourney, where users feed text prompts in order to create an image.

The role of AI in art is controversial. In the US, artists have filed class-action lawsuits against AI companies, alleging their work has been used, often without permission, while others warn the technology threatens artists’ livelihoods and the future of the creative industries.

“I think change is inevitable – the world is changing and we can choose to face it in so many different ways,” says Niceaunties. She has received online hostility from people who oppose the use of AI, including a bomb threat, and uses an alias for this reason.

Into the Auntieverse: There has also been positive feedback, including from people from different cultures, in India or the US, who can identify with the themes portrayed.

Niceaunties says she set out to reframe attitudes, and that her own perspective, too, has changed. “I actually find aunties very endearing now,” she says.