WANG XIN

Upon entering the gallery, visitors will find themselves in an ambiguous environment that simultaneously recalls a calming sanitarium for meditative retreat and a showroom for cutting-edge technological devices. Checking in at the front desk, any visitor can become a participant of the program by registering for an account on the agency’s official website. In the different areas of the space, varied installation and multimedia artworks form an array of curious stations, each representing a stage or step in the service’s alleged preservation process. The artworks juxtapose the organic and natural with the cold and mechanical, constructing a futuristic narrative wherein the human subconscious can be replicated and stored as both digital copies and physical relics.An eeriness emerges as one’s instinct oscillates between feeling at ease and alarmed, as accents of artificiality become evident in the objects and processes that the fictitious agency presents as human or spiritual.

Asking visitors to perform physical tasks such as scanning books and meditating, the agency proposes a standard ritual that translates and encodes personal tactile and sensory experiences into algorithmic data, alluding to the increasingly formatted means through which individual identity is expressed.

To the artist, the mission and business viability of Soul Light Legacy Plan is founded either on the human desire to live forever or the fear of being forgotten after death. Packaging spirituality and legacy as a luxury service, Wang creates a hyperbolic yet reflective statement regarding the factorization as well as commodification of inherent human qualities under the guise of technological advancement. Moreover, the exhibition envisions a future in which private information, to the extent of subconscious regardless of its hidden agendas in exchange for the reaffirmation of existence and promises of the future. Carefully crafting a corporate façade, veiled under technological jargon and dressed in a mindful and soothing aesthetic, the artist not only points at the artful lures of the digital era, but questions the social docility and comfort nurtured by the temptations of contemporary technology.

The artist has issued an artist statement for the exhibition, which can be read here:

From the moment visitors step into the exhibition hall, they become participants in this thought experiment. They start by choosing their “spiritual identity” and then immerse themselves in the online services of the Soul Light Legacy Plan, transforming fragments of their consciousness into digital legacies.Inside the gallery, tour guides dressed in tech company uniforms act as mobile critical devices.

The standardized service scripts designed by the artist for them form an institutional intertextuality with the gallery space. The space is deconstructed into multiple stations of installations and multimedia works. Each station serves as both a “service experience point” for the Soul Light Legacy Plan and an essential part of the cognitive experiment that dismantles technological myths. The artworks in the exhibition juxtapose the organic and natural with the cold and mechanical, creating a futurist narrative.

The artist plays a dual role: being both a tech evangelist developing a quantum consciousness exploration system and a theatrical director manipulating cognitive illusions.In the online section, the online white paper of the Soul Light Legacy Plan weaves a paradox of technological faith with AI-generated quantum data storage solutions and “superposed consciousness” M-Disks. These M-Disks are a type of disk that can hold data for 1,000 years and are placed on product shelves for future customers to purchase and stored in wooden carriers. The “superposed consciousness” data M-Disks sealed in wooden or ceramic artworks are less time capsules awaiting future decoding than temporary shelters for digital ghosts. Their true function is to allow us to temporarily escape the ultimate fear that “all data will eventually become algorithmic fodder” when we gaze into the abyss of technology.

Just as a maxim generated by AI on the Soul Light Legacy Plan website says, “I walk on a pathless road, seeking in a place of no gain. When asked, ‘What do you seek?’ I reply, ‘I seek the hidden paths on the internet, the lonely light in the data, yet the hidden paths are not my path, and the lonely light is not my light.’ But is the internet not the destination of the hidden paths? Is data not the destination of the lonely light?” This maxim encapsulates the exhibition’s exploration of the intersection between technology and spirituality, inviting visitors to question the nature of digital consciousness and the future of human identity in a post-human world.