Becoming Things Becoming Time

May 9 - July 10

Neither matter , nor presence—yet both;
unnamed at birth, formed in becoming.

We are no longer born of nature or culture. We are built—assembled through circuits, code, and technogenesis. ARTECHISM names this condition: a state where things and selves converge, machines and flesh re-compose. Here, simulation merges with ritual, data with myth, the machine with the body. We are those who compost its ruins, reassemble its signs from the remnants of civilization.

As the first exhibition in the ARTECHISM series, Becoming Things, Becoming Time brings together the practices of Miao Jing and Aidos Amantai from two parallel worlds: Delight Garden and Bolmahan. One rooted in invented textual narrative, the other in visual myth-making, these worlds mirror and refract each other, drawing us into a suspended space where time becomes non-time, and the real becomes invention.

In Delight Garden, Miao Jing conjures speculative deities, algorithmic shrines, and digital relics to navigate a world where meaning and language arise and mutate. Through acts of translation between software and handcraft, he reimagines archetypal figures and gives shape to mythic landscapes rooted in the Shan Hai Jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), local gazetteers, and folk traditions. Over time, this generative universe has evolved into a multilayered cosmology—part virtual museum, part ritual archive, part data stream, open to interception, capture, and recomposition.

Aidos Amantai’s Bolmahan takes its name from a fictional Silk Road town in his novel. Drawing on the Kazakh oral tradition of the “Falsehood Song,” he builds an epic history of Bolmahan—meaning “never existed”, a place remembered before it was ever known.

As if we were the people of Bolmahan who have wandered into the Delight Garden, we linger between relics of the past and projections of the future. Multiple realms unfold at once: a dreamlike garden inhabited by ancient spirits and sacred implements, and a glossy techno-futurist lab alive with sculpture, video, print, text, sound, and light.

Together, Miao Jing and Aidos Amantai shape a terrain of metamorphic storytelling—each work a radical visual, material and literary experiment, where art moves as breath, as rhythm, and as return.

Artist

Miao Jing, Aidos Amantai

Curator

Yanhan Peng

Producer

Edward Q. Zeng

Exhibition Design

Yalun Li / Mark

Organizer

NextG, Artech Foundation

Location

445 Park Avenue, New York