Mingde “MT” Zeng

Mingde “MT” Zeng is a Chinese-Canadian artist and open-source AI engineer based in Toronto. His photography stays close to real human life: the migration that brought him from China to Canada as a child, public protest and bodily autonomy, the games of his hometown childhood, and the brief contact between strangers in a crowd. The work has shown at the CONTACT Photography Festival, the 500px Visual Festival, and San Sheng Art Space, and earned the International Photography Awards, the Muse Photography Awards, and the 500px Best 10 Grand Award. What occupies him now is how fast AI is changing what human work is worth, and what it should be used for. His recent installations and writing examine what happens to images, authorship, and truth once a machine can generate them on demand — an inquiry he set out in June 2026 as “the semanticization of photography” in Chinese Photography. As an engineer he builds toward his answer: using AI to put knowledge that once demanded deep expertise into ordinary hands. His latest project, Genomi, lets anyone read their own DNA, work that used to require a lab and a genetics degree; his open-source projects have together earned more than 5,000 GitHub stars.

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