A Simulated Self Portrait Series
MINDSCAPE MONGOLIA is an ongoing daily series of AI-generated self portraits that imagines my first return to Mongolia since leaving in 1999. Unable to travel back because of my immigration status, I have spent more than two decades sustaining and preserving my connection to my homeland through memory, imagination, and fragments of mediated experience. Mongolia has become an emotional and spiritual dreamscape, a source of belonging shaped as much by longing as by lived experience.
The series simulates a chronological homecoming, from landing at Chinggis Khaan International Airport after an imagined journey from New York City to reuniting with relatives, visiting landmarks and monasteries, and traveling through the countryside. Each day, I create an AI-generated image in parallel with my lived experience in the US — allowing my actual emotional landscape of the day to shape the tone, atmosphere and narrative of my imagined return. The result is a parallel autobiography in which my physical and imagined lives unfold simultaneously.
The constructed reality stands as the distance between the country I carry in memory and the place that has continued to change in my absence. The homeland I hold within me is not the Mongolia that exists today; it is a place suspended in time transformed by decades of separation and my inability to witness its evolution firsthand. My cultural identity has consequently developed through a strange intimacy with absence. I experience a homeland I love deeply but know, in its present reality, only indirectly. What I recognize as Mongolia is inseparable from what I remember, what I have inherited through other people’s narratives and what I have imagined in the space between them.
There is a contradiction at the heart of this longing. I want to return, yet I fear what returning might undo. I fear not only the possibility of being disappointed by Mongolia, but the loss of the Mongolia I have carried within me. Through this daily practice, I transform displacement into a visual language, rehearsing a reunion with my family, my heritage, and the place from which I come.
Part photographic diary, part performance, and part therapeutic visualization, MINDSCAPE MONGOLIA is a homecoming performed in advance, a country reconstructed through longing, and an attempt to inhabit a future that immigration has kept out of reach. It asks what happens when the place we call home becomes inseparable from the image of home we have created to survive its absence. Until I can return physically, I continue to travel in thought foreboding the reunion to come.
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