Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty Vietnam, 2025

Description: In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Gretchen Andrew uses custom robotics to scribe popular AI-driven beauty filters from social media into oil paintings derived from pageant queens from around the world. Normally these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly. By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits series reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves.

The series is made up of a potential 100 Contestants from 100 different countries, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty looks at the homogenizing impact of this monocultural, single AI beauty standard across the faces and bodies of famously beautiful women from around the world. As this same algorithm sculpts the female form into a single, universal look, we see diversity disappear. The result is a full-body portrait of tension, where each brush stroke, each smudge, each painterly contradiction is a record of disagreement between how our faces and bodies actually look and how AI says we should be.