Growing at ZHI ART MUSEUM

ArchaeaBot: A Post Singularity and Post Climate Change Life-form was featured in Growing, co-presented by ZHI ART MUSEUM and Chronus Art Center (CAC) in Chengdu, Sichuan. Announced on 8 October 2019, the exhibition ran from 28 September 2019 to 5 January 2020 and brought together eight artists and collectives to examine the phenomenology of life, growth, and the unstable border between animate and artificial forms.

That setting gave ArchaeaBot a precise curatorial context. The work imagines a speculative organism shaped by climate change, microbial endurance, and technological transformation, so it sat naturally within an exhibition concerned with uncanny life, transgenic hybridity, and technologically extended ecology. Rather than treating growth as a simple biological metaphor, the exhibition framed it as a force that complicates taxonomy, perception, and the idea of nature itself.

For May, this presentation mattered because it placed the project within a wider international conversation about life after familiar categories. ArchaeaBot uses robotics, biomedia, and speculative design to ask what may persist when human-centred systems no longer define the conditions of survival. In Chengdu, those questions were sharpened by a curatorial frame that looked at becoming, mutation, and the eerie proximity between natural origin and artificial inception.