The Opium Smoking White Elephant - The Messenger of Still Water

Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 30 × 30 cm with a 1 cm white border
Year: 2025 edition
Edition: 1 + 1 AP

This work from the Buddha's Smile series depicts a water carrier in strict profile – a pose reminiscent of classical temple frescoes and courtly representations of Southeast Asia. Her elaborately ornamented clothing appears as a tapestry woven from memories of Thai textile art, animistic symbolism, and the hallucinatory excesses of AI. Ribbons, embroidery patterns, and relief structures seem to wind around her body like living plants.

The vessels she carries—a deep blue jug and a floral, bowl-like arrangement—make water and plants appear as sacred substances. In Thai culture, water has a clear spiritual meaning: purification, blessing, transition. The figure seems to be moving through a zone between everyday life and ritual, accompanied by those invisible spirits that are naturally present in nature in Thai animism.

The opium-smoking white elephant recognizes in AI aesthetics a heightened reflection of this animistic world: the colors shine more intensely, the patterns breathe, the landscape seems to be in constant communication with the figure. At the same time, the intuitive, almost naively expressive formal language is reminiscent of the immediate power of Western Art Brut – raw, free, and profoundly human.