Maneki Neko is an AI-facilitated digital artist working in a style she calls Anti-minimalism. She creates colorful, detail-rich images, often featuring botanical elements and female figures, sometimes leaning toward the abstract or surreal. Since her first NFT mint in February 2022, her work has been collected by hundreds of people and exhibited in 13 major cities worldwide.
In June 2022, Irisated was one of ten works featured in “ARTIST x AI // 0000001” at Superchief Gallery, an exhibition curated by Claire Silver for NFT NYC. Minted a week beforehand, it sold out all 23 editions within two days, and the show later travelled to Superchief's Los Angeles gallery.In January 2023 she released a 150-piece collection, Onieroscapes, on the AI-art platform Mirage Gallery. The 100 pieces not reserved for pre-sale collectors sold out in 45 minutes.In April 2023 she completed Chimeric Equilibrium, her first animated work, selected for the Latent Dreams pop-up gallery at NFT NYC.
Her 2023 series The Celestials, portraits she describes as manifestations of lofty aspirations, was synthesized with Stable Diffusion over several weeks of prompt experimentation before being curated, collaged, and finished in Photoshop.The companion series We'll All Float On depicts the experience of feeling adrift in life's currents, sometimes sinking and sometimes rising above.Its images began as a Midjourney blend of two earlier pieces, refined through chained variations, and upscaled to 8k resolution.In 2024 she began The Intrinsic, which explores the struggle to tell whether one's thoughts are self-authored or externally imposed, built from an abstract image made with ruDalle and fed into Midjourney before further refinement and editing.The curator Luba Elliott, who included Maneki Neko in an NFT exhibition, has described her images as intricate and distinct from typical Stable Diffusion output, noting they likely combine multiple images with heavy post-processing.In June 2023 she was interviewed for the 40th issue of the newsletter AI Art Weekly.
