Founding Research Archive · Retrospective Edition II
Systems for living
Exhibitions held in 2025Research & text: Aili XuPublished 18 August 2026
From scent and bacteria to game engines and fired earth, these exhibitions considered technology not as spectacle but as an environment already entangled with life.
Method
Prepared from official exhibition archives and published retrospectively. These are critical research notes, not a claim of first-hand or contemporaneous review.
The senses as a political and biological field
Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One
Anicka Yi’s first solo exhibition in China gathered nearly forty works around what the artist has called the “biopolitics of the senses.” The phrase refuses the separation of bodily perception from cultural power. Smell, bacteria and machines do not sit outside society; they expose how society decides what is familiar, foreign, clean or threatening.
The exhibition’s pairing of earlier work with new commissions made evolution feel less like progress than negotiation. Human intelligence was not the only measure. Organisms, synthetic systems and sensory responses formed a wider ecology in which control remained unstable.
MACHINE LOVE approached game engines and artificial intelligence as conditions of contemporary image-making rather than futuristic attractions. Curated by Kataoka Mami, Martin Germann and Yahagi Manabu, it placed technical possibility beside anxiety: virtual space can extend artistic agency, but it can also reproduce exclusions built into data and platforms.
The title’s “love” suggested attachment as much as enthusiasm. We live with systems we do not fully understand yet use every day. The lasting question is therefore ethical rather than technical: what relations do artists construct inside tools designed by corporations, trained on collective culture and presented as frictionless innovation?
Shuyi Cao and Candice Lin brought ceramics into an immersive field of myth, environmental history and material transformation. The title holds two incompatible conditions together, underwater and aflame, yet clay itself makes that contradiction plausible: earth becomes durable through heat, then carries the memory of liquid and mineral life.
The documented installation extended ceramics beyond discrete objects. Site-specific commissions allowed matter to behave as evidence of entanglement—between bodies and environments, extraction and imagination, deep time and present crisis.