The Boundary

Artist: Yu Kusube & Xiankun Luo
Term: February 12 - March 7, 2025
Open: Weekdays from 9:30 to 18:30
Close: Weekends, National Holidays

The 37th ITbM Gallery presented The Boundary, an exhibition by Yu Kusube and Xiankun Luo that explored the delicate thresholds between creation, perception, and existence. Through their distinct approaches, Kusube and Luo explored the concept of "boundary" from different perspectives—one through the lens of artificial intelligence and the other through the symbol of the automobile.

Where lies the boundary between conscious and unconscious creation? At what point does the appearance of an object begin to diverge, revealing its latent potential or decay? Kusube addressed these questions through the lens of AI, while Luo interrogated them through the motif of automobiles.

Kusube's work harnessed the transformative power of artificial intelligence, converting language into multidimensional numerical vectors that processed meaning and relationships within a vast, abstract space. This process removed language from its human context, rendering it unintelligible to intuition. Drawing inspiration from Surrealism's concept of automatism, Kusube sought to dissolve the oversight of reason, aiming to capture "thought" unbound by preconceived notions and freed from the limitations of conventional understanding.

In contrast, Luo's photographic series focused on automobiles—objects of cultural significance and economic value that embodied the tensions between permanence and transience. By juxtaposing cars of the same make and era, yet in drastically different states of condition—some cherished and enduring, others abandoned and decaying—Luo emphasized the fragility of all things, using the automobile as a metaphor for the contingent nature of existence.

Together, Kusube and Luo's works challenged the viewer to reflect on the shifting boundaries that define our understanding of creation, transformation, and impermanence in both the digital and material worlds.