Art Review: BECOMING THINGS, BECOMING TIME: BOLMAHAN AT DELIGHT GARDEN (ARTECH in NYC)

The love affair between art, technology, and imagination is nothing new. Jeff Koons creates small-scale models, digitally scanned and mapped, but he didn’t spend years hand-carving his silly balloon dogs. Likewise, Gerhard Richter never wondered out in the woods foraging for flower pigments for his still life works. Technology has always helped the arts. In 2025, the lines between canvas and code are anything but clear; it was only a matter of time before art got its own digital update.

ARTECHISM is one of these experiments, the brainchild of Edward Zeng, a man who aims to “redefine the future of art and technology” by writing a whole new visual grammar. Zeng is not your average arts patron: he’s a venture capitalist with a net worth that could bankroll a small country. In 2016, he dropped over $3 million on an Yves Klein monochrome; today, he isn’t just collecting art, he’s trying to recode it. The show I saw, Becoming Things, Becoming Time: Bolmahan at Delight Garden, was the kickoff installation of a yearlong series hosted by Artech at 445 Park Avenue. It features the talents of Shanghai-based multimedia artist Miao Jing and Kazakh writer Aidos Amantai and it is curated by Yanhan Peng, known for weaving contemporary East Asian thought into boundary-crossing exhibitions.

One important quote from Amantai’s defines part of the exhibit: “I am Kazakh, from people who have lived for centuries upon the great steppes of Central Asia. When I was a child, I once showed a photograph of my homeland to a friend. He looked at it and said, ‘There’s nothing there.’ Yet in the image, our yurts and our cattle were plainly visible. It was only that, in his eyes, they did not exist.” It’s a haunting reminder of how the absence of recognition is its own kind of erasure, and the last phrase lands with the sharpness of a microphone drop. Amantai, during the presentation of the exhibit, was there to explain a bit about his history, his novel, and how he welcomes AI as a tool, without fear.

Unfortunately, there was very little from him and his novel in the gallery. At one point, his young adorable daughter took a microphone during the Q&A, and hesitantly asked “what’s Chat GPT?” I saw one poem from the novel on one of the walls, a copy of his manuscript we could not touch, and nothing else. Amantai stated that “In this exhibition, the voices of my family will emerge in the space, reading and speaking fragments from my novel. I seek to explore whether a novel can live beyond its printed form, and can exist in the air itself. The poems inscribed upon the wall are my own questions about the self, about existence, and about truth—questions that will never find an answer, and are not meant to.” I must have missed it.

Miao Jing’s works instead, are well displayed. To the left, several small 3D printed sculptures stand like ancient relics from a future that never happened. His aesthetic, Primitive Futurism, might sound like an oxymoron, or a Burning Man catch phrase, but it’s more like a cosmic mix of history. Trained in the traditions of oil painting but clearly allergic to artistic stagnation, Miao splices together imagined relics, Buddhist symbols, mythic figures, forgotten gods, and digital artifacts into something confusing, attractive, and oddly childlike, like a cabinet of curiosities.

One of the 3D printed figurines, Imitation of Pangu, is an odd tribute to a titan of Chinese mythology presented with a dark, solid figure that’s both humanoid and intriguingly alien. There is an elegant crane with a long beak and neck so common in Asian art; an Egyptian looking hare god (or bunny-human hybrid) captured in an almost melancholic posture; snakes; multi-limbed creatures with a central body and various appendages; golden teeth and human bones; a happy sun creature, and many other strange objects.

A video installation features a series of large screens, each resembling a display case containing unique and surreal compositions, with glowing elements that look like stylized text or symbols and some of the same figures displayed on the shelves in larger sizes. The overall aesthetic of the piece blends classical sculptural forms with animation and modern, digital, design elements, creating captivating miniature worlds.

There are other interesting works but nothing as astonishing and revolutionary as stated by its marketing. Whether ARTECHISM truly reinvents art or simply redefines what we expect from a modern gallery remains to be seen. It’s clear that artists like Miao Jing are carving out a third path, one that doesn’t pit past against future but weaves them together into something radically present.

photos courtesy of Artech