How Art Museum, Shanghai, 2022:

“Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.” When Paul Valéry wrote this down a century ago, he might not foresee that human beings – a biological organism – would indeed be incorporated into machinery at such a profound level in a highly informationized time and space. In a sense, it is just as what Marx predicted: a conscious connection of machine[ Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines”, Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy]. Today, machine exists not only as a material form but also in the forms of data, algorithm and coding – virtually everything that is operable, calculable and thinkable. Ever since the idea of cyborg emerges, the relation between man and machine has always been intertwined with our imagination, vision and fear of the past, present and future.