Ctrl C+V

Curated by Glitch

The transformative power of human intelligence in the face of technological change is not a phenomenon unique to our time, but a recurring constant throughout the history of civilization. From the myth of Prometheus stealing fire, technology has always carried a dual nature: on one hand, it embodies humanity's capacity to break through limitations and reshape the world; on the other, it casts a shadow of loss of control, punishment, and ethical risk. Each technological leap seems to summon both excitement and dread. We embrace the freedom and convenience that tools afford, yet fear what may come when desire expands beyond measure and technology exceeds its bounds.

The conditions we face today—information overload, artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, and a world increasingly shaped by digital technology—should not be seen as wholly unfamiliar or unprecedented. They are, rather, the continuation of a co-evolution between technology and society stretching back centuries, even millennia. This is not to dismiss the urgency of technological ethics or the anxiety surrounding social transformation, nor to smuggle legitimacy into the expansion of new technologies. Instead, the exhibition invites us to approach technological change as an ongoing social movement and perceptual shift: to step back from simple positions of support or opposition, celebration or critique, and instead observe how technology alters the ways we understand the world, organize knowledge, distribute the senses, and imagine the future.

This exhibition does not cast technology as the protagonist of a myth of progress, nor reduce it to the root cause of contemporary crisis. Through collaboration with contemporary artists, it seeks to open a more reflexive position of looking: one in which artists draw on image, sound, installation, object, digital interface, and cross-media practice to respond to the traces technology leaves in everyday life, bodily experience, social structure, and psychological perception. Their works neither celebrate technology uncritically nor rush to pass moral judgment upon it. Instead, they capture subtler undercurrents moving through the excitement, fear, dependency, and unease that technology provokes.

The title Ctrl C+V draws on digital syntax to underscore this cyclical relationship, while pointing to the shared sensibility of the participating artists—moving between information networks and material reality, weaving together the textures of virtual and physical space, and continually asking, through acts of copying, pasting, translating, and remaking, how technology reshapes the ways we perceive the world.

Chuang Pei-Xin works through VR to conduct virtual plein air painting, using bodily presence and movement as a medium of perception to re-examine the conceptual boundaries of “painting from life” across art history. When the body is situated within virtual space, the act of painting becomes ambiguous and excessive — simultaneously a simulation of the real and a questioning of simulation itself. The felt experience of material is unsettled and suspended, and painting is no longer merely a tool of visual representation but an act of excess in a gray zone, belonging neither fully to the digital nor capable of returning to the certainty of traditional materiality. Through this practice, Chuang reveals how technology quietly rewrites the way we perceive the world, and how the distance between body and tool is continually remeasured with every virtual brushstroke.

Korean artist Gijeong Goo (丘冀丁 구기정) constructs multi-layered channels of translation between digital imagery and material reality. He draws images from the natural environment, transforms them into artificial digital forms through sculptural methods, and then reintroduces real plants and soil back into the work, allowing nature and technology to interpenetrate and interweave within the same space. This process of moving back and forth between the analog and the digital is a deliberately constructed perceptual apparatus. It makes viewers aware of the inherent technological structures and physical conditions that underlie every image, and reveals that what we take for granted as “reality” is already a composite state of multiple overlapping layers. Goo's work moves beyond the act of mere looking, calling us to reconsider how technology has quietly reshaped our imagination and understanding of nature.

Lai Cheng-Hao takes as his starting point the out-of-control and accidental images that circulate chaotically across the internet, becoming objects of collective amusement. Rather than rushing to critique or deconstruct these algorithmically propelled, virally spread visual fragments, he redirects them into the contexts of painting, installation, sculpture, and space, generating new viewing distances and material weight through the process of remaking. When an internet meme is translated into a concrete object or spatial installation, the lightness and contingency it carries collide with the slowness, tactility, and historical weight of painted material. Lai's work reminds us that the image overload produced by technology is not merely visual noise, but a cultural symptom — one that deserves to be slowed down, looked at carefully, and given weight once more.

Japanese artist collective orm オーム takes the “kitchen” as its central field, examining the dissolution and rupture of life in contemporary society through the life-sustaining act of cooking, an act that crosses time and space. The work places the ancient hearth and the modern kitchen along two parallel timelines, allowing the daily ritual of eating, which sustains life, to be reconsidered within a deeper historical perspective. orm interweaves the ethics of facing death directly embedded in sacrificial ritual with the remote violence enabled by modern technology, drawing a continuous thread from the intimate micro-scale of the family home to the macro-scale phenomena of nation and war. In a contemporary life thoroughly mediated by technology, our relationships with food, death, and others have been fundamentally restructured. It is within these ruptures that orm's practice calls us back to question the nature of life and the ethics of existence.