Johnnie Yu



The Space Between

The Space Between is the first iteration of my portraiture process, which is always a work-in-progress. It challenges personal boundaries to create more intimate portraits. Subjects embark on a guided portrait shoot and card game experience (featuring deeply personal questions) designed for young creatives, documenting the journey of opening up to a stranger.

(New York, 2022)

The theory is, performing artists and other public figures eventually develop a “personal brand” or “marketing identity.” There’s a manicured and workshopped self-introduction, life story, creative process, etc. which is shared with the rest of the world through interviews. The card game is designed to wear down defensive tendencies to get to know who they really are. Not who they want to be. Not how they wish to be seen.



Human x AI Collaboration

With the breathtaking breakthroughs in GPT-3 and GANs in 2022, especially the excitement of productizing artificial intelligence technology for creative, the discourse in the art community has largely been around the ethics of A.I. and an endless back-and-forth on term definition (i.e. “what is art?”).

(New York, 2022)

I took a slightly different approach, and see A.I. generated art as a component or intermediary of a larger creative process, rather than the end product. I set out to develop a new workflow that integrates artificial intelligence to help reduce the time I spend in planning & presenting ideas, so I can focus on creating – perhaps an advantage that most creators could leverage in today’s economy.


Polaroid Wall




© 2022 Johnnie Yu. All rights reserved.