No One Can Sit in the Chair Forever

No One Can Sit in the Chair Forever is based on publicly circulated online images of leaders, forums, and staged interviews. Using artificial intelligence, I remove the figures from these photographs, leaving behind only blurred traces of the spaces they once occupied. The clearly visible body disappears, while the chair, the stage, the backdrop, and the residual silhouette together form an image suspended between presence and absence.

In the original photographs, the figure is the unquestioned centre, serving to display status, authority, and public image. Once removed, the visual structure shifts. Empty chairs, disturbed space, and the traces that cannot be fully erased make the idea of “position” more visible than before. The chair ceases to function merely as furniture and becomes a symbol of office, power, speech, and public legitimacy.

The AI removal does not make the figure disappear completely. Blurred edges, residual forms, and incomplete voids suggest that power always leaves traces, and that technical erasure cannot fully eliminate what an image once recorded. Although the people are removed, the positions they occupied remain.

The work examines the relationship between power and visibility in public imagery, while also pointing to a broader condition: no one can occupy the same chair forever. Individuals leave, identities shift, and positions are replaced, while the stage, order, and modes of viewing built around power continue to operate. Through acts of deletion and retention, the work reflects on the temporariness of power and on how absence can make its structure newly visible.