Portrait of the Jungle People 山芭佬

Eddie Wong’s “Portrait of the Jungle People,” where he explores personal and historical absence through artificial intelligence narrative. The project originated from a misrepresented family story, Wong’s grandfather, remembered as dead, had instead “entered the jungle” as a guerrilla fighter in the Malayan Communist Party, likely killed by British colonial forces. With no records or photographs, absence becomes a central theme, evoking gaps in family history and post-colonial memory.

Wong uses fragmented narratives and ancestral memories that shape identity but resist full understanding. His practice integrates machine learning and computational art to reconstruct lost traces, blending cultural heritage, colonial archives, and personal memory. Positioned at the intersection of AI and filmmaking, Wong’s  “machine fictioning” concept fuses human memory with algorithms, generating new narratives and identities.

This work invites reflection on memory, media, and identity, challenging how we reconstruct stories from incomplete histories. By engaging with themes of loss, erasure, and overlooked communities, Wong demonstrates how human-machine collaboration can reinterpret both personal and collective memory. “Portrait of the Jungle People” urges us to reconsider how we form identities through fragmented records and media, using “restorative memory” to piece together meaning from the past.