Dusty Mag

You were closely involved in the opening of Gallery A.T. 108. How did this collaboration begin, and what was your role in shaping the inaugural exhibition?

Annie Teng and I first met at Sotheby’s, and we stayed connected through a shared interest in cross-cultural work. When she decided to open Gallery A.T. 108, the invitation to join felt like a natural continuation of that dialogue.

For the inaugural exhibition, Presence and Becoming, I contributed to the curatorial framework and helped shape how the show would be experienced—both intellectually and visually. I was also deeply involved in the opening program, conducting interviews and conversations with the artist, Annie, and a museum director. For me, curation has never been only about what’s on the wall. It’s about creating a space where ideas can be exchanged and expanded.

During the opening, your conversations touched on ink art and its evolution. What were some of the key themes that emerged?

One central idea was how ink art has traveled from a historically rooted Eastern tradition into something that now operates within a global, contemporary context. It’s no longer confined to a single cultural framework—it’s being reinterpreted, challenged, and expanded across geographies.

We also discussed how institutions, museums in particular, are increasingly viewing contemporary art through a collective lens—considering not just individual works, but how they contribute to broader cultural and intellectual conversations. Ink art is a compelling example of this shift. It carries deep history, and yet it’s actively being redefined in the present.

How do you see Presence and Becoming contributing to that wider cross-cultural dialogue?

Q.X. Wang’s work exists precisely in the space between tradition and transformation. The exhibition explores stillness and change, but also asks a deeper question: how are identity and perception constantly being formed and re-formed?

What strikes me most is how the exhibition mirrors the gallery’s own position—occupying a historic Chelsea space while introducing an entirely new vision. In that sense, Presence and Becoming isn’t only about the artist’s work. It’s about a larger moment of transition in how we think about art across cultures.

My goal, always, is to create dialogue—between East and West, between past and present, between the artwork and its audience. This exhibition brought all of those layers together.

Trying to find that gallery you’ve never been to, or rushing to meet friends at a bar across town? Phone out, Google Maps up — it’s become second nature. Making our way through crowded streets, we appear to be making conscious decisions about what we do and where we end up. Yet the very steps we take are quietly calculated and controlled. London-based Japanese media artist Mizuki Tanahara makes this invisible control tangible, interrogating algorithmic navigation through her project, Algorithmic/Random Walks in London.

Walking from Whitechapel to Notting Hill Gate, Tanahara alternated every fifteen minutes between following Google Maps’ shortest route and walking a dice-determined path. She documented the algorithm’s suggestions — restaurants, ads, personalised recommendations — alongside her own observations: objects, light, architecture, incidental details. What makes the project compelling is precisely how it troubles its own binary. Indeed, the ‘random’ layer reveals its own patterns, whether that be attention shaped by neighbourhood context, personal history, or the visual training we’ve all absorbed through years of algorithmic curation. Rather than offering easy opposition, the work forces us to confront whether attention can ever be truly random.

Tanahara’s algorithmic and embodied streams of data were translated into a two-layer architectural sculpture. The upper layer renders the algorithm in Brutalist form: acrylic planes and geometric columns represent how Google Maps structures information. This metaphor is strikingly, almost uncomfortably apt. Brutalism’s massive, opaque forms are imposing yet meant to be inhabited. They mirror the algorithmic infrastructures that guide us daily without ever fully revealing their inner logic. Both promise rational order while operating well beyond our comprehension.

Below, the lower layer sprawls in contrast: threads and organic lines forming a network of embodied observations. Drawing on Metabolism, the Japanese architectural movement embracing growth and transformation, Tanahara creates a softer geography. Her attention proves fluid: in Whitechapel, she noticed Asian cultural elements, while in Notting Hill, she focused on light and nature. Where the brutalist layer calculates, the metabolic one breathes, serving as a reminder that bodies still notice things algorithms never suggest, even if we can’t claim those observations are entirely untouched by digital life.

The resulting three-dimensional map positions rigid algorithmic architecture directly above shifting human observation. Here, Tanahara crafts a literal hierarchy that echoes the investigations of artists like James Bridle and Mimi Onuoha, whose practices similarly translate invisible digital systems into physical form. By juxtaposing algorithm and randomness, Tanahara reveals how we’re silently steered — not as accusation but as invitation to notice. In doing so, her work raises cascading questions: Is dice-based navigation truly liberating, or simply a different constraint? Can we ever step fully outside algorithmic influence, or only become more aware of moving within it?

The project deepens her ongoing inquiry: “Is the Internet healthy?” From automating privacy controls in Privacy ON to prescribing digital wellness in Net Wellness Lab, Tanahara has consistently made invisible systems tangible and critically legible. This work also echoes her earlier visualisation of X’s recommendation algorithm as a geodesic dome, where closed spherical chambers represented filter bubbles. Here, she’s moved from depicting containment to proposing movement and from diagnosing the problem to testing potential remedies.

What lingers isn’t simply the call to become a more active participant in determining your paths, but a productive discomfort: once you’ve seen the algorithmic architecture visualised, it becomes much harder to navigate unconsciously. Tanahara doesn’t offer escape, but she creates necessary friction, provoking a moment of recognition that shifts how we move through digitally mediated space.

As photographer Xinyu Gao’s images suggest, visibility is never fixed. It shifts, breathes, and glimmers in that delicate place between presence and disappearance. Her photographs don’t simply reveal things; they obscure them, soften them, and let them hover in a gentle hum between being and not-being. Across her growing body of work, Gao steps into the role of both witness and participant in the theater of perception, someone who treats feeling and thinking as inseparable. What she captures is not the appearance of the world, but the instant when vision begins to slip away.

Born in China and shaped by an ongoing inquiry into conceptual photography, and poetic abstraction, Gao holds a singular place in contemporary image-making. Her photographs often feel like attempts to remember something that can’t quite be named — the residue of emotion, the afterglow of a dream, the pulse of stillness. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Pingyao International Photography Festival and London Design Festival, yet the spaces her images occupy most deeply are interior ones: memory, reverie, the subconscious.

Gao’s practice begins where certainty dissolves. She describes her work as an investigation of visibility and invisibility, of the visual and the non-visual, and of the possibilities that sit just beyond the edge of recognition. This inquiry takes shape vividly in Windfall, a series built from phone photographs layered into dense, jewel-like compositions. Petals blur into sequins, reflections ripple like liquid, and fragments of feathers, flowers, and fabric overlap in rhythmic patterns. Each piece feels like a private note — abstract, intimate, and quietly insistent. Windfall becomes a visual language of overstimulation and digital acceleration, slowing down the spectacle until viewers must lean into texture, rediscovering sight as a form of touch. In this way, the series functions as both critique and sanctuary, offering small spaces of slowness and imperfection in a world where images race ahead of emotion.

A different form of stillness shapes Scenic Poem, where Gao turns to wabi-sabi, the Japanese sensibility that embraces impermanence and incompleteness. Built from stone, petals, and fading light, the photographs carry a soft acceptance — of decay, of transience, of beauty as something inherently temporary. Gao captures what escapes rather than what remains, the shadow just before it disappears. While her sensitivity sometimes echoes artists like Rinko Kawauchi or Uta Barth, her attention to cultural crosscurrents gives her work its own voice. Eastern philosophies of impermanence mingle with Western conceptual traditions, creating a dialogue that belongs uniquely to her. Each image in Scenic Poem is a small gesture of surrender, a quiet reverence for what trembles at the edge of fading.

This interest in time deepens further in East Coast Ride, where memory becomes a landscape in its own right. Gao’s images evoke foggy recollections — half-remembered, half-invented — suspended between the familiar and the strange. Light and texture replace documentation, transforming individual emotional experiences into something universally felt. Rather than mapping external cultures, Gao maps interior terrain, the meeting point of emotion, space, and time. Her wandering approach recalls what writer Brian Dillon calls the aesthetics of drift — an openness to detours, hesitations, and fragments.

Beyond the Borders expands this sensitivity into a large-scale project shaped by the belief that images have their own life. Shot across many countries, the series merges scenes of nature, architecture, and daily life until they echo each other in unexpected ways. Boundaries loosen; perspectives blend. Gao often says that images speak for themselves, and in this project they speak of coexistence — of the delicate tension between humans and their environments, the self and the other, visibility and invisibility. The accompanying visualizations, mosaics of intersecting textures and shimmering surfaces, turn her philosophy into something almost musical. Seen together, they form a visual symphony about interconnectedness in a fractured world.

Across Gao’s work, texture is never decorative. It is conceptual, connective, and deeply physical. In Windfall, sequins and petals behave like flickering data. In Scenic Poem, textures become metaphors for impermanence. In other series, they pulse with the vitality of the body or the quietness of nature. Gao’s surfaces are always alive; even in digital manipulation, her images feel sculpted from light. Her approach runs counter to the smoothness described by philosopher Byung-Chul Han — the frictionless aesthetic of contemporary culture. Gao’s images resist that smoothness. They slow the viewer down. They invite sensation, not consumption.

Her fieldwork-based projects, such as The Nubian on the Nile and Snow Field Variation, bring the patient gaze of the ethnographic observer into her fine art practice. Yet she shifts this observational stance inward, turning the lens into a tool for communication rather than documentation. In Snow Field Variation, mountains, herds, and clouds melt into ink-like shadows. The horizon dissolves. The perspective is non-anthropocentric; humans are not set apart but woven into a larger symphony of land, weather, and living beings. The result is a quiet form of ecological awareness grounded not in protest but in compassion and coexistence.

At the core of Gao’s work is a gentle resistance to speed, spectacle, and the flattening of experience. Her photographs remind us that sight is not neutral; it is an act of care. In a digital era crowded with imagery, she asks us to linger, to feel, to notice. Her images refuse easy definition and even refuse closure. They exist in a state of becoming, poised between abstraction and intimacy. This tension gives her work its haunting quality. In Blue Lullabies, for example, she captures the fragile world of girlhood — dreams, tears, the shimmer of nostalgia. The sweetness is never sentimental; it always holds a trace of unease, as if beauty were on the verge of breaking.

Gao’s photographs stay with you because they never settle. They shift in the same way vision shifts, in the same way memory drifts. They ask us to look slowly, to feel deeply, and to honor the delicate spaces where things almost disappear.

One of a handful of lighting designers today, Muhseen Abdullahi, is among the only who will not be limited by the quite tiring terms of the lighting industry –- brightness, efficiency, and spectacle. As a field of practitioners, there are too many lighting designers who have abandoned the art of their profession for over-engineering and the showmanship of technology. Abdullahi is somewhat uniquely solitary in his approach to using light as a means of creating experience and emotion. To him, light is thought. Light is temperament. And, light is meaning.

Yet, thankfully, in a time when the lighting design community is more than ever addicted to shallow, surface-level displays of “light,” someone has come along who is unwilling to allow that trend to continue unchallenged. Consider Abdullahi’s earlier work as part of the Transcorp Hilton Christmas village installation in Abuja. Public holiday lighting is typically a cacophony of lights, a visual overload of a sugar-coated display of excess intended to elicit awe without communication or expression. Abdullahi took a completely different path. Instead of being overwhelmed by a display of blindingly bright lights, Abdullahi provided a quiet, almost defiantly softly lit, star-filled sky of incandescent lights above the crowd that altered the emotional temperature of the space and caused the crowd to react emotionally to the experience. This example demonstrates how complacent our society has become with the mere decoration of lighting. What happened here is exactly what happens whenever a sensitive person (or designer) gets their hands on the controls of the lighting system: the air changes. The crowd changes.

Abdullahi’s work in Great Britain further refined that clarity. At Castle Park Arts Centre in England, Abdullahi brought a similar sense of discipline to gallery lighting that most designers would never consider bringing because it involves a level of humility. Rather than overpowering the space with an overabundance of confident wattage, Abdullahi opted for precision and restraint. He allowed the artworks to be able to breathe freely, but did not create an environment that was neutral. Abdullahi did not simply create a successful space. He critiqued every gallery that thinks that harsh lighting equates to professionalism. Abdullahi demonstrated that brilliance does not need to scream; it only needs to be taken seriously.

It is however Abdullahi’s work on the Sensory Architecture project in Istanbul that best exemplifies his authority as a lighting designer. In this case, Abdullahi went from designing lighting systems to designing how people perceive space. The triangular LED modules did not frame a room, but framed a state of awareness. Abdullahi’s work on the Sensory Architecture project demonstrated that people do not perceive space visually first; they perceive it through their feelings. When light and sound are designed with consideration for the way they affect people emotionally, then they can be used as a type of architectural tool to create a specific type of emotional response. Abdullahi treated this idea with a seriousness that exposed much of the gimmickry of so many of today’s interactive installations. Abdullahi was not looking for novelty. Abdullahi was looking for resonance.

The Nasarawa Technology Village Master Plan reinforced that point at scale. Designing lighting for an entire estate is one of those areas in which many designers lose sight of the nuances of their craft and fall back upon functional monotonous designs. Abdullahi instead created a new visual identity for a community. Using warm and cool colors, Abdullahi created a rhythmic connection between the street, the homes, and the public spaces of the estate that resulted in an overall living community that felt alive at night. Abdullahi did not create a space that was merely competent; Abdullahi created a space that was visionary. Most lighting master plans focus upon providing visibility for the spaces they illuminate. Abdullahi focused upon creating a cohesive emotional identity for a community.

Abdullahi’s subsequent projects in Abuja and London continue that commitment to refusing to compromise his creative vision. While other designers may find that functional spaces are aesthetically dead zones, Abdullahi finds opportunities to create harmony. Abdullahi does not install light; Abdullahi composes light. Abdullahi does not use technology for the sake of technology; Abdullahi uses technology when it advances the emotional expression of the space. Tools such as Dialux Evo and Relux become tools for Abdullahi, not crutches.

Your work treats light as both material and emotion. When starting a new project, do you approach it more like a designer solving a problem or an artist telling a story?

Sensory Architecture: Light and Sound Interaction explored how people physically respond to light and sound. What did that project reveal to you about how our senses interpret space?

The Nasarawa Technology Village aimed to define a new kind of urban identity. How did you use lighting to shape not just visibility, but a sense of community and place?

You often describe light as a “narrative medium.” If light could tell a story within a space, what kind of stories would you want it to tell?

As technology and art continue to merge, what excites you most about the future of lighting design — and what do you hope doesn’t get lost along the way?