Wenhui Lim began as your typical, well behaved woman. Raised in a traditional Chinese household within the strictly structured Singaporean society, Lim learned the rules by heart so she'd know well enough how to break them. An architect by trade, who detests being dubbed an AI artist, ("It feels limiting"), Lim created her first AI prompt in 2023. This exploration would eventually evolve into niceaunties. The Instagram page, art installation, and 'auntieverse' has evolved in the past three years to reveal all Lim has learned about skirting the system, embracing art for art's sake and paying homage to the true pillars of our modern society.
"Everything was hierarchical," Lin remarks, recalling her upbringing. "Everyone is listening to the men of the family." Upending this inequality was largely the inspiration for niceaunties. "The definition of happiness is security, and the sure path to success is happiness," Lim says disingenuously. "Singapore was considered one of the 'happiest' nations in the world." She scoffs. Lim isn't convinced that reliability and comfort ensure fulfilment, contrary to the tenets that raised her. "When I found AI, it was like travelling back to childhood," she muses. AI emboldened Lim to reframe her worldview, unleashing ideas for the sake of creativity and doodling new worlds in the name of enjoyment. "AI was the fastest route to fashioning these images and narratives I'd neglected for so long." Rather than offering the cognitive shortcut for which many demonise artificial intelligence, Lim saw it as a key to the unadulterated whimsy that was lacking in her professional and personal life.
"Auntie culture is such a big thing in Asia, but nobody likes to talk about it."
Ironically, Lim's initial inspiration to seek creative solace in artificial intelligence stemmed from one of her earliest cultural influences. "Auntie culture is such a big thing in Asia, but nobody likes to talk about it," she says. "It is a negative stereotype. As young girls, when our period comes, we say our 'auntie' has arrived. If interior design is outdated, we say it looks 'auntie'. I want to reframe that perspective."
The architect and artist's aim to change the narrative around aging for women in Asia and beyond was realised through hyper modern AI applications, hoisting the trope of the outdated auntie into a never-before imagined era. "It is a world where aunties are the main characters, along with her cat or frog sidekicks," Lim elucidates. "We explore beauty, body image and social life," she lists. "The whole process is built upon where I come from, and the way in which I've learned to interpret things." There are also parallels, Lim notes, between her former and current professions. "Architecture is all about layering concepts atop one another: context, sites, subjects. My approach to AI is the same: current affairs, my opinion and 'what would aunties do?' That is the overarching question, with a general positivity focused on the subject: the aunties." Not only does AI's integration expedite the creation of Lim's art, but it allows her to expound ideas that would otherwise be difficult to convey through analogue communication alone.
"AI is a medium like anything else," Lim avows. "People express themselves with words, with sketches, with paint. Artificial intelligence works for me because of the speed. Speed creates momentum. Where there is momentum, there is flow." In AI's ever-shifting landscape, its swiftness can feel counterintuitive to a once-gruelling artistic process. At one time, painters, writers and sculptors would obsess over the finest details of a work, spending a lifetime on a single achievement. Instead, Lim shapes her idealised world with a mouse's click, and has generated tens of thousands of images in three years. But, the refinement process of her aesthetic was far from instantaneous. "When I began, AI capability was not precise," Lim says. "As my work developed, the data was used to train advancing AI models. This allows me to prompt much more precisely. Every click is entirely intentional, and I'm able to control it in great detail." Her voice swells with passion when discussing her craft, and she satisfactorily concludes, "It's the most natural medium for me to express myself."
Though many profess that this medium takes the humanity out of art, the message of niceaunties is as human as they come. "I hope that, gradually, people will begin to see 'auntie' as a positive label and not an outdated stereotype," Lim says. The auntieverse, then, refutes both the trope of the curmudgeonly auntie and the foreboding rhetoric around 'ruinous' artificial intelligence at the same time. Lim doesn't believe that technology is killing creativity — after all she isn't outsourcing her ideas to it. "The ideas still come when I am in the shower, or sleeping, as they do for any other creative," she says. "It's much more satisfying when the ideas come from you and not the system."
Despite the auntieverse's tech-forward application, Lim aims to dispel the idea that her characters are contained to a screen. "The most exciting thing is the conversion from digital to physical," she says, touting a 2025 Oxford Street exhibition and Swatch campaign amongst her achievements. "Hopefully, in the near future, I will be able to bring the auntieverse into more physical spaces," she plots. "We are beings that value our corporeal status, as well as our spirituality. I want the all-encompassing nature of the auntieverse to cater to both of those realities." niceaunties, the Instagram page of the auntieverse, boasts 300,000 followers, each rapt by the otherworldly, joyful images Lim generates. Lim's characterisation of the aunties, as she dismantles biases around the term, focuses on freedom, joy and positivity, while tackling larger social issues with a delicate touch. "Just like Planet Earth, we have different locales. 'jelly city' explores capitalism, aunties run malls and shops, exploiting jelly citizens and their bodies as a commodity. In 'auntlantis', the aunties tackle conservation and clean the ocean floor of plastics."
Lim discloses she has recently wrapped a government project concerning public health, positioning her aunties as harbingers of goodwill and strength more so than caricatures of feminine middle age. The programming through which the aunties are generated allows them to be at once unique and universally recognisable. While each auntie is a fictionalised ideal, Lim teaches her programme the traits of an auntie through anecdotes of lived experience. "The way aunties behave has always been very personal to me," she says. "I've been angry with my own 11 aunties for years." Lim laughs. "But, I've learned that beyond criticism, that is a love language. Society is constantly labelling aunties as invisible. They hold the family together in ways they're never thanked for."
As nicaunties' and the auntieverse's notoriety have skyrocketed over the past three years, the platform has sparked multi-generational curiosity around AI. "The surprising thing is that aunties all over the world, from Mexico City or Europe, will be eager to try AI based on my art," Lim says. "Also, women my own age will approach me tearing up, feeling very seen by the women I portray." The resonance of Lim's artificially-generated matriarchs galvanize an appreciation for these pillars of the community, whom brands and governments alike so often look to capitalise on. "The auntieverse exists at the crux of all industries: film, advertising, education, to name a few."
Contrary to this, Lim describes her most meaningful project to date. "Last June, we collaborated with L'Oréal on a campaign titled The Beauty of Longevity. Not long ago, you would never associate 'auntie' with something so positive, much less new and changing ideas about beauty. It makes me optimistic."
Here lies the unifying strength of the auntieverse, and its specific AI advantage. As our culture shifts, so too does the auntieverse, perhaps at a rate that laps our own evolution. In the way their flesh-and blood muses always have, Lim's AI aunties will continue on as shepherds of positivity, of fortitude and of unconditional love in a world so desperately lacking. As for where we can find the auntieverse brightening our own realities? Lim has big plans for expansion. "The auntieverse is a parallel to our own reality, so the creation of that could go on for a while." At this year's Paris Photo Week, Lim tried her hand at an early incarnation of an in-person auntieverse experience: 'mirror into auntieverse', where onlookers would see their image reflected back in the visage of an auntie, who then insults the patron. This technology only scratches the surface of Lim's plans to bring the auntieverse sentiment earth-side. "I always say there is an auntie in all of us, as our voice of self criticism," Lim concludes. "That is the mirror into the auntieverse, but also an invitation to empathy. I think we all must begin there, then work forward together."
WRITER Delaney Willet
Images courtesy of niceaunties
