Virtual
Kintsugi

In the Japanese art of kintsugi, broken ceramics are repaired with gold, making the fracture visible and beautiful. The damage is not hidden; it becomes the most valuable part of the object. Virtual Kintsugi transposes this philosophy into the digital realm, using generative AI to restore damaged artworks from museum collections.

The AI does not faithfully reconstruct what was lost. It hallucinates, invents, proposes its own version of what might have been. The result is a hybrid object: part human creation, part machine dream. The seam between the original and the generated is made deliberately visible, like the gold line in kintsugi. The damage is acknowledged, the repair is honest, and the new whole is something that neither the artist nor the algorithm could have produced alone.

Virtual Kintsugi became the first NFT to enter a French public museum collection when it was acquired by the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence. The work raises questions about authenticity, authorship, and the status of the artwork in an age where restoration and creation are performed by the same tools.