In recent years, the possibilities at the intersection of art and technology have drawn growing attention from practitioners on both sides, as digital visual expression and technologies like A.I. become increasingly pervasive, shaping not only communication but day-to-day life. As with many nascent artistic languages or emerging cultural fields throughout history, what remains conspicuously absent is a robust curatorial and academic framework capable of critically engaging with and legitimizing these new forms of expression—not to mention consistent funding and a dedicated collector or patron base to sustain their long-term development. Only recently have meaningful efforts begun to reconfigure this landscape.
The Artech Foundation, which was envisioned and founded by Edward Zeng and debuted amid the frenzy of New York’s art week, now promises to foster the growth of this fledgling ecosystem. Its mission extends beyond simply bridging art and technology, seeking instead to connect their physical and digital manifestations while cultivating communities that explore their potential to address some of today’s most urgent global challenges: sustainability, human evolution and the planet’s future. Launching with the year-long exhibition series titled “ARTECHISM – The Future of Art & Technology in Human Civilization,” Artech (which opened as a 4,000-square-foot exhibition space on Park Avenue) aims to forge new pathways at the convergence of art and technology, supporting artists, thinkers and engineers through awards, grants and commissions.
Zeng, a serial entrepreneur, venture investor and private equity fund manager, is a founding partner of NextG Tech Limited, a company focused on next-generation technologies, sustainability and digital infrastructure. A key figure in China’s digital transformation since the 1990s, he is also a managing partner of China Bridge Capital, which oversees investment funds with a combined $2.5 billion in assets. In his off hours, however, it’s art that consumes him.
Zeng’s passion for art emerged not from a formal education or structured collecting, but from a series of what one might call life adventures. When we spoke with the tech entrepreneur ahead of the opening of “ARTECHISM,” Zeng revealed that his first job as a student in New York was in the logistics department at Christie’s. One day, he was tasked with delivering several million-dollar paintings to a woman. “I spent over an hour trying to figure it out, hoping she’d at least give me a decent tip,” Zeng told Observer. Instead, she handed him a single dollar, saying it was all she had. “A few years later, I was at a Christie’s auction—this time, I was placing a $3.5 million bid for a major Yves Klein. I think that’s where my art journey really began.” Today, Zeng’s personal art collection includes iconic works like Damien Hirst’s Five Aspects of God and five pieces from the artist’s celebrated butterfly series, meditations on one of humanity’s most enduring questions: the existence of God.
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With the founding of the Artech Foundation, Zeng hopes to inspire and advance the conversation around creativity and technology by addressing deeper questions of human evolution. The idea first came to him while alone in Montana, immersed in the vast stillness of nature and its overwhelming power. “Last September, I was in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “You’re alone with yourself and with this thousand-year-old mountain.” The solitude prompted a reflection on the arc of civilization and its uncertain future, leading him to identify what he calls the “three singularities”—existential crossroads humanity faces today. “Are we going to be sustainable with nature, or will it destroy us? That is the first singularity. The second concerns our relationship with technology: will we become slaves to A.I. and the metaverse, or remain the masters and creators of it?” The third, he adds, is about human coexistence: “Will we destroy each other—or find a way to live in peace?” For Zeng, these are the defining, urgent questions of our time.
He believes deeply in the power of art to confront these dilemmas. While he acknowledges that artists may not be able to cure society’s ills or provide answers, he sees in their work the potential to illuminate what’s at stake and help us imagine new paths forward. “I came to a conclusion: art is the soul of time,” he said. “So I wanted to combine art, my passion, with technology and my business to create a time and space where people can grapple with these questions.”
Curated by Yanhan Peng and featuring works by Shanghai-based artist Miao Jing alongside novelist Aidos Amantai, Artech’s inaugural show, “Becoming Things, Becoming Time / Bolmahan at Delight Garden,” weaves sculpture, text, sound, video and print into a layered meditation on human consciousness and transformation. (The “ARTECHISM” manifesto, published in the catalog accompanying this first exhibition, reads: We are no longer born of nature or culture. We are built-assembled, through circuits, code and technogenesis. We claim this entanglement, and let it transform us. Artechism is not an art genre but an emergent state of being.) The show features a seamless convergence of analog and digital, body and machine, nature and simulacrum, the real and the virtual.
Drawing inspiration from ancient Chinese mythology and ancestral tales, symbolic figures from Miao Jing’s digital installation Delight Garden materialize in the space as analog miniature sculptures—3D-printed relics that function as contemporary votive offerings or a fragmented anthology of ancestral symbols, resurfaced and “re-fleshed” from the digital realm. As the exhibition’s manifesto describes, these sculptural characters—both digital and material—exist in a fluid techno-temporal transition, “within the interstice, the glitch, the fold.” They reappear in a video work that constructs a virtual museum: part ritual archive, part myth-making machine, collapsing boundaries between memory and projection, analog matter and digital creation. Downstairs, in a space specifically designed for digital art, a longer video expands this cosmology, accompanied by bone-like sculptures and imagined fossils—artifacts of a porous exchange between physical and virtual, past and present, reality and possibility.
Meanwhile, an excerpt from Amantai’s visionary poem Bolmahan appears on one of the gallery walls in Chinese, English and Kazakh—the author’s native language—accompanied by a printed volume and a sound recording. Peng told Observer that the intention was to bring something even more human into dialogue with technology. Through the layered voices of poetry and ancestral fiction, Amantai embarks on a profound meditation on the nature of humanity from a no-place called Bolmahan—a name that means “Never Existed”—where utopia remains possible, imagined beyond the confines of physical reality.
The experience culminates in an immersive performance conceived by Brooklyn-based director Katherine Wilkinson and writer Elizagrace Madrone, who transform the venue into an imagined archaeological site of the future. Here, guests become explorers, uncovering the evolving relationship between art, technology and the human body. Rooted in the concept of the body as both terrain and canvas, the piece invites audiences into a poetic, participatory journey shaped by movement and storytelling.
Operating across dimensions and disciplines is essential for Zeng, whose goal is to build initiatives that move simultaneously through the physical and digital, blending material and immaterial, tradition and innovation, fiction and reality. “We want to create a global first: we call it multi-module art,” Zeng said. “Multi-module means combining something one can experience in the physical world, like a painting or sculpture, with the digital space and dimension; we’re using A.I. to generate a lot of content.”
Crucially, this interplay between online and offline, digital and physical, extends far beyond the act of creation. It encompasses the entire life cycle of a work: its exchange, distribution and experience. “We want to establish a complete ecosystem—something that no gallery or museum has achieved to date,” he added. At its core, Artech envisions a value chain that functions seamlessly across both physical and digital realms, while embedding itself within vertical applications. As artistic expression increasingly integrates technological innovation and ventures into digital frontiers, Zeng asserted, a new infrastructure becomes necessary—what he calls ABM, or integrating A.I., blockchain and the metaverse. In this framework, A.I. aids the creation of art, blockchain secures its tokenization as equity and the metaverse unlocks new modes of distribution.
His ambition is to construct an interdisciplinary platform that brings together artists, philosophers and creatives alongside financial experts and impact investors—united in a process of co-creation that aims to ‘engineer’ new theories and visions for the future of humanity, while also reflecting on the arc of civilization. Artech could be at once a platform, a forum, an incubator and a marketplace—situated at the nexus of technology, finance and art and built to support this collective pursuit of reimagining the human condition and charting alternative futures.
“If art is the soul of time and technology the engine of revolution,” Zeng said, then this first exhibition is merely the opening chapter of a broader initiative—one that aims to engage approximately 144 artists and creatives from its earliest stages. The ambition is not just to present art as commentary, but to establish a network and incubator capable of addressing the urgent challenges facing humanity today, using artistic practice as a roadmap for further human evolution beyond mere survival.
To realize this vision, the foundation has established two expert committees tasked with selecting participating artists. However, Zeng’s overarching goal is to grow the project into an open-source platform that operates simultaneously online and offline. Through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), participants will eventually vote on the artists they believe are most compelling for this next phase. “This is just phase one. On May 8, we launched the infrastructure. We’re launching the roadmap. But eventually, we’ll invite artists from around the world to co-create—across nations, generations, cultures and religions,” he explained. The ambition is vast, and the project appears to have both the funding and structural foundation to pursue much of what Zeng envisions. Although Artech’s first show signals a departure from the entertainment-driven, immersive digital spectacles seen in recent experimental ventures, a question remains: will the traditional art world embrace it?
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