About
Mingde “MT” Zeng is a Chinese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and open-source AI engineer based in Toronto, whose work explores photography, memory, migration, public life, and machine-mediated representation. His work has been exhibited at CONTACT Photography Festival, 500px Visual Festival, and San Sheng Art Space, and he has received the 500px Best 10 Grand Award, International Photography Awards, and Muse Photography Awards. In April 2026, he published the concept of “the semanticization of photography” in Chinese Photography Journal. Alongside his artistic practice, he works across large language models, AI image systems, and agentic systems, and his open-source projects have received more than 4,000 GitHub stars.
Selected Background
Publications & Talks
Exhibitions
Recognition
Education
Contact
Selected Works
2024 / Installation, AI image system, podcast, prints
The Honest Photographer begins with the classical demand to take honest photos and then subjects that demand to a contemporary media condition in which images are generated, selected, narrated, and critiqued by AI systems.
2025 / Generative multi-agent installation
AI Art Is (Not) Art externalizes an argument that is aesthetic, technological, and psychological at once.
2024 / Photography series
Returning to the places he knew before emigrating from China to Canada, MT photographs children moving through parks, schoolyards, and streets that still hold fragments of his own childhood.
Writing
Index
Writing, papers, and research-oriented texts that extend the practice into explicit argument.
Writing
This article proposes the concept of semanticization of photography to describe how photographic images are pre-labeled, embedded, and summarized within platform circulation and multimodal AI pipelines, and are subsequently invoked as semantic objects in processes of retrieval, recommendation, and generation.
Cluster
Projects on AI, recursion, voice, and the instability of authorship.
2024 / Installation, AI image system, podcast, prints
The Honest Photographer begins with the classical demand to take honest photos and then subjects that demand to a contemporary media condition in which images are generated, selected, narrated, and critiqued by AI systems.
2025 / Generative multi-agent installation
AI Art Is (Not) Art externalizes an argument that is aesthetic, technological, and psychological at once.
2025 / Installation with sound
Are You Sure?
2026 / Essay and photo sequence
Phone Eats First is a byproduct of insomnia and sashimi.
Cluster
Street-based works that examine protest, urban alienation, and moments of unstable contact.
2022 / Photography series
Echoes of Defiance links two geographically distant flashpoints in 2022: the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States and the protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran.
2023 / Documentary photography
Documented during the protests around Donald Trump's indictment, this series examines a political atmosphere charged by spectacle, hostility, and theatrical performance.
2023 / Street photography
Dream Together follows the contradictory emotional texture of North American city life.
Cluster
Projects shaped by childhood memory, migration, and cross-cultural symbolic life.
2024 / Photography series
Returning to the places he knew before emigrating from China to Canada, MT photographs children moving through parks, schoolyards, and streets that still hold fragments of his own childhood.
2023 / Photography series
Hyakki Yagyo begins with a childhood inheritance of ghost stories in China and encounters Día de los Muertos in Oaxaca as a radically different visual logic: not death as suppression, but as public color, rhythm, and shared celebration.