Shenzhen · China
Shenzhen's First Art and Technology Biennial Opens
A Glimpse of the Infinite brings together over fifty artists and scientists to probe the quantum nature of observation
A Year-Long Experiment in Perception
The inaugural edition of the Shenzhen Art and Technology Biennial (SATB) opens to the public on 30 May 2026 at the Shenzhen International Museum of Art (SIMoA), running through 30 April 2027. Titled A Glimpse of the Infinite, the exhibition is directed by Zikang Zhang and curated by Naiyi Wang and Mónica Bello. It gathers more than fifty international artists, scientists, and researchers around a single, deceptively simple proposition: that observation is never passive, but an act of intervention that collapses possibilities into a single, fleeting present.
Drawing on the language of quantum mechanics, the biennial posits that what appears before us is only ever a fraction of what is. Every definition casts its shadow; what remains unsaid sinks into darkness. Existence becomes a perpetual deferral of appearance, and certainty merely the accidental condensation of probabilities, arrested by the act of looking. The works on display do not offer answers. Instead, they function as portals to the uncollapsed—speaking in light, sound, matter, and code to narrate what language cannot hold: the blurring of boundaries, the suddenness of leaps, the absence of presence.
Works That Make the Invisible Tangible
This inquiry unfolds across multiple registers. Semiconductor's Light-in-Flight slows the speed of light to human-visible frame rates, revealing how a pulse travelling toward us arrives in reverse order due to the geometry of photon paths—a direct challenge to our intuitive sense of temporal sequence. Perry-James Sugden and Daria Jelonek's Quantum Lens employs mixed reality as a symbolic optical device, rendering visible three quantum phenomena—entanglement, probability, and tunnelling—that resist direct perception. Ralf Baecker's Floating Codes exposes the inner aesthetics of artificial neural networks, where signals loop and mutate in an unsupervised computational ecology, mirroring the probabilistic dynamics of quantum systems.
Libby Heaney's Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) is a generative four-channel sound installation unfolding in infinite time, never repeating. It entangles Jung's shadow with quantum physics—where observation alters systems—using IBM quantum entanglement data in custom software. The work stages a sonic field where knowledge emerges relationally, through interference rather than direct access.
New Commissions and the Quantum Gaze
The biennial also presents a constellation of newly commissioned works. Chen Baoyang's Mechanism and Wave stages a philosophical theatre where a multi-armed machine dissolves into a probability wave under strobe lighting, only to collapse into a single posture the moment a viewer gazes upon it—a visceral metaphor for measurement and the loss of agency in AI. Yang Song's Photon and π weaves steel wire into interlocking loops where light traces infinite refractive paths, turning the unmeasurable nature of pi into a sculptural condition that sustains continuity precisely by evading total capture.
Seph Li's The Light Named You stages the ruins of a dead universe where only quantum fluctuations persist. Viewers' gravity resonates, and the first light after silence is born from them. Tim Yip's Existential Doubt constructs four spaces representing four dimensions in an eternal cycle, each illuminated by a guiding light, inviting participants to question the purpose of existence within a multidimensional frame.
Visitors as Participants
As the curatorial statement reads: "Perhaps true manifestation always lies on the other side of appearance—the unobserved still adrift." This awareness of incompleteness pervades the exhibition, which treasures decoherence and disturbance over pure coherent states. Visitors are not passive observers but participants in a delayed-choice experiment, where each decision retroactively rewrites the work's past and future.
The full list of participants includes AATB (Andrea Anner & Thibault Brevet), Alex Long Yuan, Bai Shui, Black Void, Carol Prusa, Chen Baoyang, Chloé Delarue, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, David Young, Dennis Hong, Guo Donglai, Juan Cortés, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Li Shurui, Li Xinyue, Libby Heaney, Lisa Chang Lee, Liu Jiayu, Liu Wentao, Miao Xiaochun, Perry-James Sugden & Daria Jelonek, Qi Zhen, Qiu Zhijie, Quadrature (Juliane Götz & Sebastian Neitsch), Ralf Baecker, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt), Seph Li, Shen Shaomin & Liu Shaoshan & Shen Tongyi & Jiang Suxuan, Tania Candiani, Tim Yip, Tobias Zaft, Victor Vasarely, Wang Jianwei, Wang Tianxin, Xie Xiaoze, Yael Bartana, Yang Song, Yussef Agbo-Ola, Zhang Ding, and Zou Luyang.