Opening to the public on May 9, 2025, Artech Space is a new exhibition gallery in NYC spanning 4,000 square feet on the ground floor of 445 Park Avenue, where art and technology meet. Founded by Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur and art collector Edward Q. Zeng in 2024, the non-profit organization Artech Foundation, through awards, grants, and commissions, supports artists, thinkers, and engineers in creating new work that centers on the shared human experience and responds to the shifting technological, social, and intellectual currents of the 21st century by cultivating artistic practices that transcend conventional boundaries, envision and create new pathways, and employ innovative practices with data, technology, and other new media.
For its inaugural exhibition, Becoming Things, Becoming Time: Bolmahan at Delight Garden, curated by Artistic Director Yanhan Peng, Artech is presenting mixed-media works of sculpture, text, sound, video, and printmaking by Shanghai-based installation artist Miao Jing and Kazakh novelist Aidos Amantai as part of Artech(ism): A Manifesto – a series of four two-month-long shows, each presenting two artists expanding the cultural conversation around how creativity and technology are shaping our world. As we enter an era shaped by AI and extended reality, Artech is committed to reimagining the role of art within these evolving technological landscapes, in the liminal spaces between digital and physical, looking at the past and looking forward. It seeks to create spaces for reflection, resistance, and renewal, where art becomes not just a response to change, but an active agent in shaping the future.
At the press preview on May 7, Zeng questioned if we’re the “slave of technology or master of technology?” He sees art as the soul of time, and as technology advances, it becomes intertwined with the art of the era. It’s a challenging subject that has also been at the center of a number of Broadway and Off-Broadway plays this past season, including McNeal at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, in which an acclaimed novelist and Nobel Prize nominee, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., uses AI to create a new book appropriating a story that’s not his to tell, and ultimately appears on stage as a visually convincing AI version of himself. We’re shocked to learn that it’s not the actual physical character, when the real actor walks down the aisle of the theater towards his AI image.
The preview of the Artech exhibition also extended into the realm of theater, with an immersive and interactive live performance, analog roots // digital blooms, created by Brooklyn-based director Katherine Wilkinson and writer Elizagrace Madrone, and designed by Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma, Qingan Zhang, Skye Mahaffie, John Polles, Kristin Paige, and Brandon Bulls. A company of five – Gaby Diaz, Cara Ricketts, Ben Holbrook, Amber McNew, and Jae Woo – entered the space, formed a rotating circle, offered passages of spoken word, and Diaz (who was honored with a 2023 Chita Rivera Award for MCC’s Off-Broadway production of Only Gold, for which Wilkinson served as associate director) then donned a hoop skirt (first invented in 1846), danced, and invited attendees to join her, as her dark shadow loomed on the wall behind. It was a reminder that people through the ages, who are now gone but remain as shadows in our minds, always employed the latest technological advances in the arts (here, fashion). It was an affecting ritual exploration of the roots of our shared past, in keeping with the theme of “becoming things, becoming time.”
That salient message was also delivered by a mobile case of shelves filled with vintage equipment, from a portable television showing old movies, to reels of film, slide carousels, Polaroid pictures, a Canon photographic film camera, and other items that are now obsolete in our ever-changing world of technology, a kind of “living archive” triggering memories for adults, leaving the younger children of our digital age wondering, and calling for a harmonized future by joining everyone together in a vision of humanity’s endless possibilities.
Artech Space opens to the public on May 9, 2025, at 445 Park Avenue, ground floor, NYC. Becoming Things, Becoming Time: Bolmahan at Delight Garden plays through July 10, 2025. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
