Art Central 2026 puts Digital Culture under the microscope

Art Central 2026 opens its VIP Preview today at Central Harbourfront, with the fair running through to Sunday 29 March. Curated by Zoie Yung, this year’s creative programme takes digital culture not merely as subject matter but as a condition to be interrogated — examining the frictions between human intuition and algorithmic systems, and the ways technology reshapes how we move through, and make meaning of, the world. Collectors, curators, and art-world figures are expected to gather at one of Asia’s most forward-looking fair experiences across the five-day programme.

A commission built from the inside out

The centrepiece of the programme is the fair’s Hong Kong Artist Commission: Recursive Feedback Ritual 0.01 (2026) by Kaitlyn Hau (b. 1999). Working as an artistic director and visual engineer for virtual-singer performance, Hau has developed a methodology she calls “selective inclusion” — the use of micro-gestures, subtle shifts of breath and posture, to heighten the affective presence of digital personas. For Art Central, she has scaled this practice into a monumental real-time computational sculpture (715 × 830 × 300cm), in which motion-capture-driven visuals loop through a recursive feedback system, rendering her own psychiatric symptoms as measurable cycles of repetition and dissociation. The work’s ambition lies in its refusal of easy spectacle: rather than aestheticising technology, Hau uses it to reclaim bodily agency, transforming what she describes as autonomous internal “invaders” into a generative vocabulary of movement and image.

Time distorted, bodies transformed

Presented daily in the fair’s Central Theatre, the performance programme Endless Night and Midnight Sun draws on polar cycles of light and darkness as a metaphor for the compressed temporalities of the AI era. Four commissioned works examine how altered rhythms of contemporary life manifest in and through the body.

Jiaming Liao (b. 1992, Guangdong) appears in his signature muscle suit for IYKYK (ON AIR) (2026), a hybrid virtual-physical performance in which audience members are invited to “transform” his body through interactive participation — a pointed reflection on how beauty and masculinity are constructed through technological mediation. Chaklam Ng(b. 1984, Hong Kong) stages Shadow Work (2026), a sound performance in which percussive activation generates multi-choral electronic feedback, creating an ephemeral dialogue between the body and its digital echo.

Isabella Isabella (b. 1986, Hong Kong) offers perhaps the programme’s most emotionally raw contribution with I see blood in the sky today. (2026), a durational work exploring “teleproximality” — the hollowed imprint left in a parent’s body by a child’s absence — performed through a series of textural suits, each articulating new configurations of intimacy and care. Rounding out the programme, Susie Au (b. 1962, Hong Kong) transforms the Central Theatre into a surreal corridor constructed from cardboard boxes for Memory In Motion – Walk-In-Cinema (2026), where audiences will encounter looping projections drawn from Au’s music video archive, reassembling latent recollections into new sensory narratives.

Reading the room: video art and the limits of AI

The fair’s Video Art programme, Reading the Room, makes a sharp and timely observation: that artificial intelligence routinely processes vast datasets yet struggles to apprehend nuance, subtext, and tone — and that this technological shortfall is not so different from the misalignments inherent in everyday human communication. The selection foregrounds hesitation, emotional undercurrent, and the labour of meaning-making.

Liang-Jung Chen (b. Taipei) transforms financial bureaucracy into durational performance with UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee (2025), a screen-recording of a live YouTube fundraising campaign that renders the artist’s efforts to secure permanent UK residency as public data. Yifan Jiang (b. 1994, Tianjin) presents One Sunday Morning(2021), a hand-drawn magical-realist animated fable imagining a world in which humanity abruptly loses language — a work as elegant in execution as it is bleak in premise. Jon Rafman (b. 1981, Montreal) probes the uncanny space where artificial consciousness acquires human messiness with Cloudy Heart – Strawberry Moon (2025), centred on an AI-generated bedroom-pop star whose ‘e-girl’ persona unfolds across social media feeds and algorithmic aesthetics. Adrian Wong (b. 1980, Chicago) contributes a two-part work — With Love from Hong Kong (Episode 1) (2025) and With Hate from Hong Kong (2025) — that sutures personal narrative with the pulp conventions of American soap opera and 1960s kung fu cinema, centring female protagonists of exaggerated agency and physical prowess.

Central Stage: practices that endure

Presented under the curatorial direction of Enoch Cheng, the Central Stage feature spotlights six artists whose practices have accumulated significant institutional recognition. Three are announced for this edition: Yogyakarta-based Arahmaiani, a seminal figure in Indonesian contemporary art whose work since the 1980s has grappled with gendered power inequalities and cultural commodification through performance, installation, and community-based collaboration, with a showing history spanning Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum, and documenta fifteen. South African artist Esther Mahlangu, celebrated for bold geometric abstractions rooted in Ndebele cultural knowledge, whose practice reanimates ancestral visual systems across an expansive range of surfaces and has entered collections at the British Museum and Centre Pompidou. And Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen (b. Helsinki, based in Massachusetts), known for black-and-white self-portraits that place the human body in dialogue with the natural world, and named in 2025 as recipient of the Académie des Beaux-Arts Photography Award, William Klein.

Why it matters

Art Central 2026 arrives with a curatorial framework that feels tightly conceived and genuinely argued, resisting the temptation to use “digital culture” as a catch-all theme in favour of specific, pointed questions about embodiment, communication, and time. Yung’s programme does not assume that technology is either villain or saviour — it simply asks what it has done to us, and whether we’ve noticed. For collectors making the trip to Central Harbourfront this week, the answers are worth sitting with.

Art Central 2026 runs 25–29 March (VIP Preview 24 March) at Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong, 9 Lung Wo Road. Tickets at artcentralhongkong.com.