Yokohama Hakkeijima’s AI art show repaints famous sea paintings as 2050’s plastic oceans

Japan produces a large volume of plastic waste per person, yet when Dentsu researched attitudes for the Sendai Umino-Mori Aquarium, 72 percent of respondents said they knew little about plastic litter in the sea — the problem felt unrelated to their lives. The aquarium, run by Yokohama Hakkeijima, wanted to make it personal.

The teams at Dentsu, Dentsu Digital and Dentsu Live started from a forecast in the New Plastics Economy report: by 2050, plastic in the ocean could outweigh fish. To visualize that, they chose seven of the world’s most famous paintings of the sea — including Hokusai’s Great Wave, Van Gogh’s seascape near Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Gauguin’s Tahitian works — and trained AI on the painters’ techniques and on simulations of 2050 plastic volumes.

The AI then repainted each masterpiece as if it had been created in 2050, replacing pristine water with floating bottles, straws and other garbage rendered in the original artist’s brushwork. The resulting “Ocean: Future Masterpieces” exhibition ran for ten days from July 12, 2019 at the Sendai aquarium, drawing about 30,000 visitors and broad media attention; one living artist, Christian Lassen, later exhibited his own repainted version, extending the campaign’s life.

At Spikes Asia 2021 the work won Grands Prix in both Digital and Digital Craft, and Epica 2021 awarded it Bronze in Creative Use of Data and Experiential & Shopper Marketing — cited as an example of technology serving an emotional, universal message about the environment.