“Organic Digital” by artist Melting Wang, on view from November 17 to December 31, 2025. Rooted in a dual reflection on agricultural and technological logic, the exhibition showcases the artist’s recent works, exploring the tensions between nature and technology, art and labor, causality and loss of control, emergence and adaptation.
“I planted beans below the southern hill;
Brush grew lush, while bean sprouts looked sparse and still.”
— from Returning to the Gardens and Fields (III) by Tao Yuanming (Eastern Jin Dynasty)
“You reap what you sow” embodies a desire for linear causality. Farming techniques, in essence, serve to mitigate the uncertainties of nature. What humans must do is labor repeatedly and wait—wait for the outcomes promised by technique to arrive to the greatest extent possible. In the context of contemporary digital technology, the deterministic logic of computation firmly binds cause and effect, seemingly eliminating uncertainty. Yet, as individuals facing technological futures, people instead experience greater uncertainty and fatigue. On the other hand, nature—once an arbitrary arbiter of individual fate—has now become a relatively predictable “natural course.”
Melting Wang’s practice anticipates a creative force born from loss of control. It awaits the prolongation and subtle transformation of mechanical instructions during waiting, much like Tao Yuanming’s “not-so-successful farming,” where unexpectedly sprouting wild grasses become a new field for redefining harvest. “Organic Digital” metaphorically reflects contemporary existential expectations: we are alienated by digital tools, yet rely on them to connect with the world. Today, the traditional master-servant relationship between humans and technological objects no longer applies. Technological objects are gradually being assigned a certain “subjective perspective.” New technological subjects are often likened to children eagerly absorbing information, self-organizing streams of water, insects, or other imaginative frontier dwellers, tangled fungi, or silently self-generating plants. By analogizing mechanically generated structures to natural forms and infusing the “randomness” of the physical world into the order of technical production, people attempt to digest or mitigate their anxiety and rejection of technology and its creations.
WANG YUCHEN 王宇琛 