Future Relics — An Archaeology of the Present

Future Relics positions the contemporary moment as a future excavation site. Through large-scale ceramic installations, hybrid digital–physical processes, and sculptural fragments that hover between ruin and reconstruction, the exhibition imagines how our present might be interpreted centuries from now. What will survive when technologies shift faster than human habits, emotions, and cultural infrastructures? What forms of memory will be preserved, distorted, or erased?

The exhibition expands upon the inherent paradox of ceramics: it is simultaneously one of the oldest human technologies and one of the most vulnerable to breakage, erosion, and loss. In Yoyo Hu’s practice, this paradox becomes a metaphor for the instability of the digital age. Works often begin as 3D scans or modeled surfaces—smooth, idealized, infinitely modifiable. But once translated into clay, fired, and reassembled, they accumulate cracks, irregular textures, or intentional ruptures. These material imperfections echo the fractures in contemporary identity: the tension between curated digital selves and the physical realities we inhabit.

As artificial intelligence increasingly intervenes in perception, labor, creativity, and decision-making, the exhibition asks what forms of humanity might remain legible in the distant future. Will our technologies be seen as extensions of our bodies, or as monuments to our anxieties? Will future civilizations understand the emotional and spiritual life embedded in our artifacts, or will they read our traces only through the lens of data and utility?

Hu’s installations operate at an architectural scale, resembling archaeological walls, stratified terrains, or ceremonial fragments whose functions have been lost. Light plays a crucial role, illuminating fractures, casting moving shadows, or exposing internal cavities—suggesting that illumination in the age of AI is always double-edged: revealing and obscuring, clarifying and distorting.

Future Relics ultimately proposes that the artifacts of our time—hybrid bodies, digital ruins, reconstructed memories—are not endpoints but transitions. They remind us that every era imagines itself at the center of history, yet every era becomes sediment.

The exhibition invites viewers to ask:
When future archaeologists sift through the remains of the 21st century, what stories will our fractured technologies, bodies, and memories tell about us?