The deep integration of technology into daily life and the spread of posthumanist thought are quietly transforming our understanding of familiar objects and bodies. Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg reveals the hybridity of the subject—humans are a composite of interwoven materials and information, a mixture of organic and inorganic, existing as beings inhabiting the liminal space between binary oppositions. Her later notion of “making kin” further points to the possibility of symbiosis across the boundaries of organism, nature, technology, and culture.

Within this context, the exhibition Ghost in the Shell brings together ten pieces by ten artists, ranging from reinterpretations of classical motifs to sculpture embodying inner psychological states; from experimental film staging absurd, cybernetic gestures to installation that evokes a feeling of vulnerability and wandering through personal and collective memories. These works are collectively “incubated” in the shell-shaped underground space, forming a complex whole that is both cohesive and fluid: in this contact zone, each piece extends invisible tentacles of meaning: Although varying in materials, techniques, and representations, they activate the agency within heterogeneous materials through similar strategies of “micro-intervention”. By exploring, touching, and interweaving with one another, these artworks generate a relational field that dissolves established cognitive categories and nurtures new hybrid subjects.

Each artwork represents a “micro-intervention” on everyday objects and natural imagery. By means of material substitution, spatial or contextual displacement, or digital simulation, artists reframe the familiar items into new existences imbued with a sense of mystery, the uncanny, and humor, thereby re-examining the subtle relationships between body, technology, and nature in current life. Linhan Yu, Yiy Zhang, and Friedrich Andreoni use modern technology and multiple perspectives to re-contextualize classical narratives and archetypal objects from the East and West, uncovering subtle implications of subject construction that appear evident yet are easily overlooked. In dialogue with them, Vasil Berela, Monica Piloni, and Manuel Tozzi explore the philosophical transformations of the body in a posthuman condition. Through various strategies of material estrangement, their sculptural works question the certainty of the body as a fixed biological entity and instead reveal its plasticity as a convergence point of nature and technology.

Two works with a distinctly cyberpunk style—Yun Kima & Anneliese Greve’s installation and icysaw’s video—focus on the symptoms of present-day society. Using current technology merged with biological structures, Yun Kima & Anneliese Greve materialize the tension between organic physical fragility and the persistence of data flows marked by digital Fordism; Icysaw’s creation employs artificial intelligence to create an apocalyptic romantic illusion, where uncanny human figures and various animals, like exiled ghosts, roam through ruined landscapes, reflecting the profound estrangement, vanity, and unease of the present moment.

The installations of Norman Maýn and AI video of Ivona Tau function more as monumental presences, concretizing individual trauma and fragments of memory. Norman Maýn weaves together lights, plants, and farm objects into a polyphonic narrative about fragility and wounds, confronting the scars left by human desire and destruction while exploring how memory and the sense of loss permeate the material world. With AI algorithms, Ivona Tau reconstructs her family photographs from the 1960s to 1980s, attempting to fill in her mother’s vanishing memories due to dementia. This work creates a digital family history that feels both familiar and impossible to precisely restore, probing how technological intervention distorts and reshapes memory while touching upon the private yet elusive past embedded in family narratives.

Ghost in the Shell aims to explore how artists might reactivate our perception of the established world in an era of hybridity. Rather than celebrating popular technological trends or issuing a moral critique of any one concept, the exhibition probes the complex liminality of subjectivity in a posthuman context, examining its unfinishedness, its constant interaction and co-evolution with the external world. Visitors are invited into the humorous, estranged, and even uncanny atmospheres created by these creations, experiencing how commonplace items and natural forms, reconfigured by the artists, generate new possibilities for symbiosis across body, technology, and nature.

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Text by Chen Wang