Inner Optics in Art: Transformations of Ontological Vision in Hokusai, Van Gogh, and AI Generation

Art has long been treated as a representation of the external world. This paper argues that major moments in art history—from Hokusai’s psychological luminosity to Van Gogh’s physiological oscillations and ontological density, and finally to contemporary AI diffusion models—are better understood as a genealogy of “inner optics.” Hokusai’s glowing contours visualize emotion-induced brightness; Van Gogh’s swirling night skies record the instability of embodied perception; his sunflowers express the rising density of being itself. Modern AI diffusion models mathematically reproduce this whole-to-part emergence through density fields converging into form. Across these cases, a single axis becomes clear: the visualization of the emergence of being through inner light, rather than external representation. This reframes art history as the history of inner optics.