Yuz Museum

Yuz Museum is a non-profit contemporary art museum in Shanghai, founded in 2014 by the Indonesian Chinese entrepreneur and collector Budi Tek. The museum was originally located on the West Bund in Xuhui, in a former hangar converted from Longhua Airport, and relocated in May 2023 to Panlong Tiandi in Qingpu District. Blending the characteristics of traditional Jiangnan vernacular residences with modern design, the new museum is dedicated to exhibitions, collecting, and public education.

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When I visited today, an exhibition titled The Machine Remembers was on view on the museum’s basement level. The artist is Karinta Vatanajyankur. Combining wall text and visual works, the exhibition can be interpreted along the following dimensions:

I. Core Theme: The Interweaving of Labor, Gender, and Technology

The exhibition continues to explore the intersection of labor, gender, and technology. In her earlier work, the artist focused on traditional manual labor, especially textile production, objectifying her own body as if it were a machine part. In more recent works, such as the Cyber Laborer series, she turns to the alienation of “mechanization” in the digital age. Through performance and the integration of AI and machinery, she examines the human condition under the intervention of algorithms and machines, as well as family memory and the ways in which the “machine” can become a medium for carrying history and memory.

II. Symbolic Metaphors in the Visual Works

Set against highly saturated backgrounds in red, teal, blue, and orange, the works present surreal fusions of bodies and objects with striking visual impact:

Bell-shaped lamp and upside-down body: A human body hangs inverted beneath a lampshade like a pendulum or a machine component, suggesting time, constraint, and the instrumentalization of the body.

Bow and reclining body: The body is stretched and fixed by a bowstring, appearing as a hybrid of human and machine, evoking tension and the objectified condition of labor.

Red diptych: A body curls inside a container or around a rope-like rod, while petals or root-like textures scatter below, echoing the wall text’s poetic line, “Every act of remembrance is a death; every act of forgetting is a birth,” and probing memory and disappearance.

Spiral trajectory and reclining figure: A body lies within a red spiral—suggestive of algorithms or cycles—aligning with The Machine Remembers in its questioning of the nature of existence.

Orange waves and two figures: In connection with the idea of the “mother machine,” this work expresses the continuity of body and emotion, touching on intergenerational memory.

III. Text and Philosophical Reflection

The wall text includes poetry and questions in both Chinese and English, reinforcing the exhibition’s critical perspective:

Machine memory: “Machines remember not through blood, but through code… machines awaken within thought.” This raises questions about whether machines can possess consciousness and how human memory is being reconfigured by technology.

Ultimate questions: A series of pointed rhetorical questions goes straight to the heart of the matter: “Has humanity shed its soul, existing only within the structures of modernity?” “Can we, like machines, be dismantled and exchanged for value?” “If true soul arises from suffering and pleasure, is it only the body that has been mechanized?” These questions prompt viewers to reflect on human nature and the alienation of labor.

IV. Overall Narrative

Through the combination of bodily performance (visual expression), poetic text (philosophical reflection), and AI and machinery (as medium), the exhibition constructs a field of “cyber labor.” The artist transforms herself into a vessel of “machine memory,” critiquing the alienation of human beings disciplined by algorithms in the digital age, while also preserving a tender gaze toward family memory and emotional continuity. Ultimately, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how individuals might seek out and define their own existence in an era when the boundary between human and machine has become increasingly blurred.