I’m firmly a millennial, and honestly, I can’t complain. Sure, we’re avocado-toast-shamed into oblivion and blamed for killing everything from diamonds to department stores. But we’ve also had the rare privilege of growing up in a strange and specific in-between. I remember life before tech was everywhere. I knew how to burn a CD before I ever touched a touch screen. I was well acquainted with the pre-iPhone internet and actual boredom.
That perspective – one foot in the analogue, the other scrolling through the algorithm – made
our cover feature this week especially resonant. Tai Kwun’s current show, “Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud”, may have inspired it but Lavender Au dives beyond the exhibition, exploring how a new generation of Chinese artists are using technology not just to make art, but to interrogate the systems that shape us – war simulations, data infrastructure, surveillance, memory, even surrogacy. Wu Ziyang’s AI-powered works recreate the 10 days he spent in Kyiv under drone threat. Xin Liu sends her wisdom tooth to space. Cao Shu feeds Hiroshima survivors’ stories into generative models, asking what it means for trauma to be archived by machine.
AI is “like a ghost, neither dead nor alive”, says Hangzhou-based artist Cao. That feeling, of neither dead nor alive, is exactly what Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s robotic arm, featured on our cover, evokes, too. It’s unsettling, mesmerising, in some strange way almost human in its movements. I’m sure you’ve seen images of it knocking around on social media but if you haven’t been to see it yet in person, I urge you to do so.
In their new Wong Chuk Hang studio, Aaina Bhargava meets
Alexandra Batten and Daniel Kamp, the art couple behind
Sex Tape (2023), an intimate encounter filmed and saved to a USB and embedded in a glass coffee table. Their entire body of work plays with tension: rubber bird spikes and lacquered stone, domestic softness wrapped in industrial sheen. Between the two of them, it’s design as devotion. Each piece, as they put it, an attempt to impress the other.
You may be Metropol’ed out with all the news of the 35-year-old dim sum institution’s closing last month. To that I say, how could you? Billy Potts reports on a different angle than the halting of dim sum trolleys:
the removal of the Metropol’s neon sign, one of the last still standing in Admiralty. Taken down the day before the restaurant closed, it was part of a shrinking pool of fewer than 500 functioning neon signs in Hong Kong. The team at Streetsignhk, alongside Po Wah Neon Light, had just two days (and a typhoon delay) to dismantle and preserve it. The hope is it’ll eventually go on display at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology campus that is taking over the space. A small win, in a city where most signs don’t get saved.
In Indonesia, Marco Ferrarese heads to
the remote Banda Neira, once the centre of the global nutmeg trade. He finds traces of Chinese history tucked into a shuttered temple, family gravestones and the odd colonial leftover, such as a pair of lions taken from the local temple and now perched outside a Dutch governor’s former mansion. It’s a slow unravel of a story mostly forgotten, but as I found out, and so will you, not entirely gone.
