About AI Nüshu

AI Nüshu

Nüshu (女书), also called "Women's Script," is a unique language created and used exclusively by women in Hunan Province, China, for centuries to communicate Chinese in a world where they were denied formal education.

Can AI learn from ancient Chinese women and create their own secret language?

This project trains AI agents to imitate illiterate women in pre-modern China to create a new language system, symbolizing the defiance of patriarchal constraints and the emergence of language in a non-Western, feminist context.

This is the first art project to interpret Nüshu from a computational linguistics perspective. Two AI agents simulate how ancient women developed a unique language under the constraints of a patriarchal society. This cultural phenomenon resonates with the emergence of non-human machine language under human authority, both metaphorically and practically. Essentially, we integrate cultural phenomena into an AI system.

AI Nüshu
AI Nüshu

Contrary to the predefined rules like Morse code, Markov chains, and fictional constructed languages, AI Nüshu evolves organically from the machine's environmental observations and feedback, mirroring the natural formation of human languages. The meaning of language in vector space gradually emerges into the symbols in the system.

As this new language is decipherable and learnable by humans, especially Chinese speakers, it inherently challenges the existing paradigm where humans are the linguistic authorities and machines are the learners.

AI Nüshu
AI Nüshu

Awards

  • 2025 Lumen Prize, Carla Rapoport Award, winner
  • 2025 Red Dot Design Concept Award, winner
  • Ars Electronica 2026, Digital Humanity Award, honorary mention

Publications

  • Yuqian Sun, Yuying Tang, Ze Gao, Zhijun Pan, Chuyan Xu et al. 2023. AI Nüshu: An Exploration of Language Emergence in Sisterhood Through the Lens of Computational Linguistics. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Art Papers (SA '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 4, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610591.3616427

Credits

  • Artist: Yuqian Sun
  • AI language system development: Zhijun Pan, Yuqian Sun
  • Unity development: Chuyan Xu
  • Website development: Siyu Hu, Hui Yan, Weizheng (Katheryne) Xu, Huichuan Wang
  • Research work: Yuqian Sun, Yuying Tang, Yanrang Wang
  • Advisors: Tristan Braud, Zhigang Wang, Chang Hee Lee, Ali Asadipour
  • Supported by Lumen Prize - Carla Rapoport Award.

About the artist

Yuqian (Uchan) Sun (CN), also known as CheeseTalk, is an artist, game developer and AI researcher based in London. Yuqian aims to create "alive" narrative experiences that extend beyond video games and into our daily lives through conversational AI agents.

Yuqian's interdisciplinary arts and research have been featured in galleries and tech conferences, including SIGGRAPH, CVPR, NeurIPS, GDC and New York Times Square. She won the Red Dot Design Award and Lumen Prize in 2024.

Personal website: https://fakecheese.me/

IG: @cheesetalk1997