Interview with: NastaGorai

August 2025

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NastaGorai is an aspiring AI artist exploring how visual culture and AI systems reflect (and often distort) body image. Through a blend of language and digital imagery, she challenges visual stereotypes, especially around plus-size bodies, reclaiming space and confronting embedded beauty norms.

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Welcome NastaGorai, first tell us about your background and why you chose to pursue this career. Do you remember the first artwork that stirred something inside you?

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I remember always existing around art as a child, especially contemporary art. Back in the 90s, my parents organized an international contemporary art festival in Siberia and since then all those new and emerging art forms’ve felt more familiar to me than classical art,
and they still do to this day. To see and to interact with visionaries from all around the world at an age of 6-8 years did something. I couldn’t put it into words back then, but now I realize: that sense of openness and togetherness had a profound impact on who I
am today. And even though, like many kids in Russia in the 90s, I took painting, music, and dance classes, in my free time I gravitated toward creating with tools like Photoshop and CorelDraw rather than using traditional media. So I have always been close to art, admiring it and collecting it as an adult, but I never truly created it myself until I discovered generative AI.

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Who are some of your favorite artists? Or who has been inspirational recently?

 

There are so many, and more every day. I want to name quite a few. Among AI artists, there’s Mindeye (Veronika Pell) and Rebecca Smith Mamatangyai. Mindeye (and her creative school) was the one who introduced me to AI as an art medium in the first place. Talk about pushing boundaries, her work is so layered, it is not just another random image on your feed, I can spend a lot of time just examining it closely and looking deeper under each layer. Mamatangyai is simply amazing. The themes she explores in her work really speak to me. And to be honest, I often feel jealous and find myself thinking, “OMG, how did she do that?” These two women are the kind of AI-artists I hope to become when I grow up. There are also young traditional painters from Russia Akhmat Bikanov and Lucy Soloveva (LU) and I really hope to have them in my collection one day. I especially love Akhmat’s watercolor paintings and his use of color. His works feel very intimate and sincere, familiar and new at the same time. I feel the same way about LU’s portraits. Her paintings and ceramics move something inside me, they make me feel warm and happy.

 

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What is your relationship with social media, and how do you use them?

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As an AI artist, I feel that social media and the internet in general are actually the most natural environment for my creations to exist. I don’t chase algorithms and simply see social media as an open display or a showcase gallery of my own making as well as a way to connect with other people around the globe and to discover the world, ideas, art and inspirations.

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Tell us a bit about the process of making your work?

 

My work typically begins with words. How do I describe to an AI what I want, what I feel, what I need from it? It often starts as an English lesson. Since English is not my first language, I first have to find words or phrases that an English-based AI interprets with the same imagery as their equivalents in my mother tongue. The process usually begins with bilingual online dictionaries, followed by monolingual dictionaries to find more accurate or nuanced alternatives. Depending on the initial results, I might check if there’s a corresponding Wikipedia article translated directly from Russian into English. After that, I google, carefully reviewing the image results to see if they align with the mental imagery evoked in my native language. If that approach doesn’t work, I consult ChatGPT for translation and interpretation suggestions. Once I’ve identified the best-fitting words and phrases, I test them in Midjourney. If the initial results fail entirely, I restart the process. Only after this linguistic groundwork do I begin focusing on the image itself: the style, lighting, composition, symbolism and meaning, emotions, references, media, and more. This codependence between imagery and linguistics is actually what attracts me most in the whole process. Frustrates too. But so is live.

 

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What do you say to the classic comment: "I could do it too"?

 

Yes, you could. But you didn’t. I feel this comment is thrown around AI art even more often than usual. I get it: AI makes it very easy to steal, to profit off of others’ work. It can be used very unethically (like every other medium by the way). That’s why it’s on us, users, to set rules and boundaries. It's our responsibility. But here’s what AI doesn’t do: it doesn’t make it easier to create, to find your voice, or to nurture an idea. You still need skills. You still need taste. You still need knowledge and experience. Most of all, you need a strong understanding of yourself. So, overall, if you think you could do it, then go ahead. Do it.

 

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What is the meaning or creative motivation behind your work?

 

AI is trained on a massive amount of images and videos created throughout our existence as a civilization, so it's inherently stereotypical. Even AI moderation systems recognize this. For example, Midjourney AI-moderators once notified me that my prompt, which requested typical features of a bigger female body, was considered offensive. As a result, Midjourney generated an average, idealized body instead. So, my main motivation is to challenge those stereotypes. I don’t feel the need to make every series explicitly about body issues. Instead, I want to tell different stories with plus-size characters. To show and to see that it’s okay. You are okay. Your body is okay. And your story deserves to be seen and heard even if you don’t fit in.

 

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We are at the end of this short interview, would you like to add something about your artistic research? How did you find the collaboration with our gallery?

 

​As an aspiring artist, it’s a great honor to have my work included in your catalogue and online exhibition. Being recognized in this way is incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for the support.

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