DE SARTHE is pleased to present Melting Suns on the Screen, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Liao Jiaming, concluding the gallery’s eighth annual de Sarthe Artist Residency (deSAR). Featuring a new body of installation, video, and mixed media artworks, the exhibition imagines an abandoned site of worship, in which relics of a fictional religion are preserved and now discovered. The exhibition’s mystic narrative is founded on the notion that personal desires are the root of all belief systems. Mediating between the spiritual and secular in contemplation of contemporary desires, the artworks manifest as sacralized artefacts of the technological era. Melting Suns on the Screen opens August 31^st and runs through September 28^th.

Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has given birth to innumerable faiths in search of ultimate fulfillment. For millennia, we looked to the gods hoping that our wishes would be granted, and we have made beautiful objects in our desire-driven devotion. In the age of instant gratification, Liao Jiaming examines the constructs of faith through similar paradigms in contemporary technology. As he invents his own technocentric religion, the artist reenacts the role of both the creator and the follower.

During his residency in the same space, the artist’s interactive installation The Arcana Intelligent (2023) posed as a figure of divination. Utilizing a combination of different AI algorithms, the installation translated comer queries into personalized tarot cards, successively building an archive of anonymous prayers and anxieties. As the exhibition opens, the fictitious deity is no longer present – what was once its temple is now a sanctum of its remnants. The iconography it created manifests as various objects in the space.

With reference to the interior of gothic churches, a selection of images generated by The Arcana Intelligent were developed into varied stained-glass installations placed around the gallery. The most monumental of which is a triptych titled (Modern) Revelations (2024). Depicting fragmented roses and racecars amidst glorious greenery, the tarot card from which the artwork found its composition was generated based on the question: “How do I be young and rich forever?” Subtly aglow, the form of the artwork in juxtaposition with its prompt alludes to the growing egocentrism fostered by modern beliefs. In a similar way that stained glass had memorialized saints, social technology has provided the means for self-glorification and immortalization. Ultimately, it is also the collective products of this process that inform the wisdom of Liao’s contemporary deity.

A quiet cacophony of voices emerges from behind the glass partition. Comprising an array of 3D hologram fans and a layered multi-channel soundtrack, Vanity of Vanities (2024) is the artist’s visual and audio rearrangement of data collected from The Arcana Intelligent. Built on the skeletal structure vestigial to the now dismantled AI installation, the arrangement of its components recalls the anatomy of a PC. On the floating displays, a series of seemingly arbitrary images play one after the other – collected during the residency, these are discarded photos that visitors had to offer in exchange for Liao’s AI guidance. As unintelligible voices permeate the surrounding space, the installation becomes reminiscent of both a shrine and a database, wherein past prayers are perpetuated.

As seen from historical reliquaries, the innate human attraction toward shiny objects has largely defined what we consider precious materials. Broken Memory is a body of mixed-media artworks that reconsiders technological hardware under this context. Using motherboards from different computers along with found materials such as natural shell, silicon chips, and glass, the artist imagines the artworks to be artefacts, fragmented and displaced over time. Just as the motherboard was removed from a larger entity, each artwork comprises a fictional tarot card that has been isolated from the deck. In the background, a faded collage made from newspaper articles about AI appears as if scattered or shuffled scriptures.

A mural of entangled bodies printed atop a quilt-like collage of the artist’s used clothes, Liao’s Open Yourselves (Ourselves) (2024) draws a connection between the representation of beauty in religious iconography and that in social technology. Developed from the artist’s ongoing investigation of technology’s impact on queer culture, the artwork begins with Liao’s vast collection of found imagery from gay dating apps – specifically, headless mirror selfies boasting perfectly sculpted torsos. Despite their dehumanizing anonymity, these images have become almost an archetype of desirability on gay dating platforms. Contemplating the emphasis, even fetishization, of bodily perfection within this culture, the artist feeds these images into AI, subsequently generating a grotesque yet lavish profusion of flesh, visually evocative of a Renaissance fresco. Yet, as the resultant image is manually transferred onto the artist’s old shirts, the original composition appears only in exhausted tatters. Yellowed, stained, and sewn together to mimic the image, the clothes recall the intimacy that is coveted yet lost in the collective desire to be worshipped.

At the end of a long red carpet, The Creator 2.0 (2024) awaits. As if an altar built in commemoration of The Arcana Intelligent, the interactive installation is composed of a headless, solitary figure stood atop a luminous card vending machine. Upon inserting a token, visitors will receive a card at random, each with an image that is AI-generated from the same set of found photographs used in Open Yourselves (Ourselves). Printed on holographic cardstock in reference to celebrity trading cards, the distorted representations of the male body not only allude to the glorification of certain body builds but are also reflective of the dysmorphia caused by canonical definitions of beauty. Imposing a physical ritual on its participants, the novelty of the installation materializes the aspects of objectification and gratification that are normalized in online dating culture.

There is an important notion that underpins the exhibition – that in reality, divinity is but a subconscious projection of the self. It is under this framework that the deification of technology can be justified. As such, the artist has also lent the form of his own body to several artworks, including The Creator 2.0 as well as The Arcana Intelligent. The final artwork in the exhibition is a video titled Kept Between Us (2024), in which the artist engages in self-reflection as The Arcana Intelligent. Within the video, the familiar entity enters into a philosophical soliloquy in contemplation of human nature. Interspersed with footage and AI-generated videos of Liao’s everyday life, the video breaks the fourth wall and serves as an epilogue to the narrative.