The Age of Aesthetic Intelligence did not begin with AI. It began with a question that Dr. Yi-Chen Guo has been asking in public since 2005: how can beauty become part of everyday life, and what value does it create when it does?
This article follows that question through the public record. Where a public source exists, it is linked.
2005: a talk in Hong Kong
By 2005 Dr. Guo had spent almost a decade bringing art into everyday objects through art licensing, starting with the company he founded in Taiwan in 1996. That November, at the Asian Cultural Co-operation Forum in Hong Kong, he gave a public talk on the value of beauty. His argument was simple. People do not lack a need for beauty. What they often lack is an easy way to meet it in daily life.
Forum record, Asian Cultural Co-operation Forum 2005
2007: a book with a name for it
In June 2007 he published a book whose title translates as Aesthetic Wealth. The first word of its Chinese title is the term this platform translates as aesthetic intelligence. The book gathered his thinking on beauty and the value that culture adds to ordinary things. In its preface he wrote that once a person's sense of beauty has been opened, "the light of dawn outside the window, an afternoon shower in the city" all become ways to feel it.
2017: teaching
By then he had completed a PhD in aesthetics at Peking University, with research on beauty in everyday life. In 2017 he joined the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he teaches and supervises graduate students.
2026: the same question in the age of AI
For the 2026-27 academic year he is teaching a graduate course called Cultural Creativity: Aesthetic Intelligence and IP in the AI Era. Its twelve sessions move from beauty as discovery, choice and feeling to perception, judgement and creation, and to how AI relates to human creativity.
He sums up the shift in three steps: the agricultural age depended on physical strength, the industrial age on intellect, and the age of AI on aesthetic intelligence. What is aesthetic intelligence? explains the idea in full.
What this history does and does not say
The 2005 talk was about art, cities and everyday life. It did not predict generative AI, and we do not claim it did. What carries forward is the question itself. When machines can produce images, text and sound in seconds, the human part of creative work moves towards noticing, judging and choosing. That is what we mean by aesthetic intelligence.
The platform was built to work on that question in public, starting with teen creators. Its first exhibition, The Age of Aesthetic Intelligence: Who Am I?, invites creators aged 13-18 to make interactive works about identity and the relationship between people and technology.