ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI is honoured to announce the group exhibition Beyond The Circular Ruins, showcasing works by artists aaajiao (b. 1984, China), NOH Sangho (b. 1986, Korea), RAO Weiyi (b. 1993, China), TAN Mu (b. 1991, China), and WU Ziyang (b. 1990, China), on view from May 23 (Fri) to July 19 (Sat), 2025. The exhibition explores fissures in algorithmic systems and generative technologies, presenting aesthetic and conceptual experiments born from artists’ embrace of “non-mastery” amid conflicts between machinic logic and human intention, manifested through glitches, voids, aberrations, and discontinuities.

Exhibition Theme
“For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. […] They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”

This closing passage from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins (Las Ruinas Circulares) unveils a recursive Samsara of creation: a sorcerer from the wilderness conjures another human’s flesh and consciousness through dreams, after experiencing ruptures of dream, delirium, and awakening, until finally igniting illusion life with fire. Yet when the newly born youth departs for the next crumbling sanctuary, the sorcerer’s own burned sanctuary is consumed once more—the creator, too, is an illusion dreamed by another.

This technological parable persists in our “eternal present”: AI generates “intelligence” through layered data and backpropagation-based iterative training, its stacked architectures entrenched in path-dependent technical paradigms. The black-box nature of deep learning (with its inherent lack of explainability) renders retroactive tracing and correction mechanisms nearly inoperative, ultimately breeding simulacra of technological autonomy. Yet the power relations within technological systems—such as the data politics of algorithmic bias—also overflow human intentionality through opacity, particularly in the liminal zones of systemic turbulence: boundaries between binary oppositions like human/machine, logic/emotion, input/output, and intentionality/automation dissolve here.  The glitch here is not an error but a declaration: critical reflection emerges at these fissures when the system transiently exposes its inherent biases, its opacity, or its discrepancies from human cognition.

Rather than striving for mastery over AI, these artists embrace non-mastery, allowing for slippages, unpredictability, and co-authored emergence, seeking possibilities beyond predetermined cycles. Their practices foreground not resolution, but ambiguity; not fluency, but friction. Beyond The Circular Ruins thus proposes the seam not as a site of closure or division, but as a space of radical potential—a zone where perception is refracted, art critically entangles with technology, and birthplaces of new possibilities.

Venue
ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI, 2F-205, 30 Wen’an Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai, China 200085

Artist
aaajiao, NOH Sangho, RAO Weiyi, TAN Mu, WU Ziyang

Exhibition Dates
May 23 – July 19, 2025

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM

Website
https://www.arariogallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/arariogallery_official/

Contact
sojung.kang@arariogallery.com

(Text and images courtesy of ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI)