During a visit to Joy Hester’s retrospective at Heide in 2022, I began to see and feel Hester’s work in a new way. Having studied her work in high school, it was an interesting experience to re-experience her works in a new stage of my own life. Her style was incredibly expressive, at times unbearably emotional and without doubt intensely iconic. She died at the age of 40.

It spurred a thought within me. I wondered if I could train an AI system to generate new works on the same themes: Birth, Love, Sex and Death, in the style of Joy Hester. WWJHPN? What would Joy Hester paint now?

As I started witnessing the results, another question came up: even though, it seems, we can technically generate new works based on Joy Hester’s aesthetic, does that mean we should?