Hyper Museum Hanno in Saitama will devote its entire space to one artist's synthetic memories. Emi Kusano's large-scale solo exhibition "End of Nostalgia" runs November 14, 2026 through January 31, 2027, gathering new installations, sculptures, and prints built with generative AI, with the exhibition space itself composed as one continuous installation.

The museum, which opened in March 2025 inside the Nordic lifestyle complex Metsä Village under director Shigeo Goto, has programmed shows at the intersection of nature, digital culture, and character art. Kusano, born in Tokyo in 1990, has worked across disciplines incorporating AI and other emerging technologies, showing at venues including M+ in Hong Kong, the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

At the heart of her practice is the idea of "pasts and memories that might have existed," including eras before her own birth. Mining Japan's street cultures across decades, from takenoko-zoku dancers and gyaru to decora and gothic lolita fashion, she layers AI image generation, selection, and editing to produce scenes that feel remembered but never were. Her signature series "Ornament Survival" trains an AI model on her own face and body, then casts her digital doubles in an array of social roles and personae.

What distinguishes the work is its deliberate friction: rather than faithful reconstruction, Kusano prizes the sense of wrongness and unease her images produce. She describes importing her own culture and experience into AI-driven expression as a modest form of resistance, and play, against an increasingly homogenized world. The Hanno show, her largest to date, tests how far that resistance can stretch when nostalgia itself is manufactured by machine.