In a city of the future, the rain falls relentlessly. The deluge has gone on for years. It has altered people’s imaginations and desires, and they dream of a boundless arid desert. In the cinema, clips from the movies Solaris and La Jetée play on a loop, set to Bach chorale preludes—serving as a fragmented depiction of the “coming world.” The Coming World gives real urgency to the theme of our relationship with nature, highlighting challenges such as climate change, species extinction, pollution, renewable energy and overpopulation. This allows us to think about nature from a distinctly relational perspective, and in so doing bring about new knowledge and technologies within both our transcendental and everyday knowledge of nature. As a result, technology will change human minds and bodies in ways that will allow us to adapt to the natural environment of the coming world.
Martin Heidegger's essay The Age of the World Picture sees the present as an era of representation in which the dominance of media and technology have become evident, and he presents a critical view of this media society. With humans becoming the agents in the process of representing the world, he calls the world bound together as this representation the “world picture.” He also suggests that by ushering in cooperativity through the media, modern subjectivity could lead to a totalitarian world in which subject and object are immersively united (“planetary imperialism”).
Modern society has lauded the “universal values” of freedom, human rights, and democracy. But it has also affirmed limitless human desire, and the capitalism that is driven by this desire has become globalized, leading to fierce competition among nations over their national interests.
Based on the premise of a contemporary aporia (a difficult problem with no solution), this exhibition will convey messages from artists who come up with new protocols for communication, intervening in the sphere of public decision-making.

The astonishing evolution of technology has exceeded the limits of our comprehension, and it is often accompanied by an eerie feeling. The twentieth century psychologist Sigmund Freud referred to this as the “uncanny,” a phenomenon in which it feels as if something familiar has transformed into something alien. This is powerfully reflected in the art of an age in which AI and biotechnology have become deeply integrated into everyday life. This sensation is called the “technological sublime,” or sometimes the “techno-sublime.” The exhibition contextualizes this concept with insights from Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui and French curator Hélène Guenin, reexamining our sensibilities.
"The sublime" is a sensation that has been the source of inspiration for artists since the age when nature—in all its beauty and violence—was likened to a Leviathan-like monster from the abyss. Eighteenth-century philosophers described the mesmerizing experience of the overwhelming forces of nature—raging seas, lightning strikes, and glaciers—as "the sublime." However, with glaciers becoming tourist destinations as they disappear due to global warming and the oceans becoming polluted, can we still feel the same sense of “the sublime?” This is changing, and rather than nature, what we fear today is uncontrollable technology, such as runaway artificial intelligence, nuclear accidents, and man-made viruses.
French curator Hélène Guenin’s Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibition, Sublime, was a comprehensive look at the historical evolution of the sublime spanning modern and contemporary art history, anthropology, and architectural history. Building on this lineage, this new exhibition examines the "technological sublime" offered by contemporary artists.
The artists in this exhibition share characteristics common to the age that transcend regional boundaries; they take as the subject of their work the myth of exponentially developing technology, and they create heterogeneous "chimeras” in forms that can be called “abstract figurative.” Andrea Samory reinterprets the sublime of the Baroque period through distorted chimeras and Daisuke Ida uses a many-eyed monster to symbolize the surveillance society. Ai Makita expresses her awe of technology through extremely abstract artifacts, and with her "artificial womb,” Ionat Zurr interrogates a future in which reproduction has become a technological function. The technological sublime that resides in these works is the “experience of a certain limit,” inviting viewers into the essence of the Anthropocene, an age besieged by the artificial. In a world where the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, and between the real and the virtual, have disappeared, we can feel the beauty and the danger of the mysterious future that is arising from accelerating technology.