When AI Meets Ancient Crafts: How an HKUer Gave Voice to a Forgotten Tang Poetess

Can AI recapture the magic of something as traditional as xuan paper? Or the lives and struggles of a Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) poet?

For HKU PhD student Liu Yuqing, experience suggests the answer is a resounding yes. The short AI-generated film she co-directed, “The Tale of the Peony”, has found audiences from Beijing to Venice – and taken home multiple awards, including Best Film and Best Art Design at the 16th Beijing International Film Festival’s AIGC Film Shorts Section.

Co-directed with Jintao Sun, the short is a supernatural narrative inspired by Yu Xuanji, a talented but somewhat forgotten female poet from the late Tang Dynasty whose life has often been overshadowed by male-centric historical accounts.

Rather than using conventional digital backdrops or the sometimes uncanny realism AI is known for, Liu and Sun chose to ground the film’s visual language in xuan paper, a traditional Chinese paper known for its absorbency, transparency, and texture.

The choice was deeply intentional. “I chose to use xuan paper to retell the story about Yu Xuanji because first, the texture of xuan paper itself is light, soft, and almost transparent,” Liu explains. “It has a kind of metaphorical connection with women’s bodies and women’s feelings.”

She adds that for a poetess like Yu Xuanji, paper is both empowering and entrapping: “It naturally becomes the medium through which she writes. But at the same time, it also becomes the medium through which she’s written by others.”

Beyond Beijing, “The Tale of the Peony” has also been screened at Hiroshima Animation Week and at events during the Venice International Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival, as filmmakers around the world explore how emerging technologies can intersect with classical storytelling.

The Beijing International Film Festival established its AIGC (AI-Generated Content) Film Section in 2024, making it the first dedicated section among major international festivals focused on AI-driven visual creation. Since then, it has attracted thousands of submissions from dozens of countries.

Liu’s work is supported by Professor Tim Gruenewald, Programme Director and Associate Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and Founding Director of the eXtended Humanities at the Arts Technology Lab. The lab focuses on research at the intersection of extended reality (XR) and the humanities.

For Liu, the technical innovation is secondary to the human story. “I want people to remember Yu Xuanji as a talented poetess, as well as other talented poetesses in ancient China,” she says.

“It was really difficult for them to leave their names in history. Because, although they are quite talented at poem-writing, they were still discussed from a male perspective.”

In the future, she hopes to continue developing new projects, including a music video she’s working on with Sun and the music producer for “Tale of the Peony.”

“I got into film studies because I like film, but I never had the resources and time to make my own,” she says. But now, new tools have made it possible for me to make a film by myself.”