Phoebe Hui's The Lurking Void at Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) featured in Art Emperor, reviewed by Andi Yang.
“I like taking machines apart to see how they work. Once the casing is off, the circuit board’s geometry—its traces, solder points, and connections—becomes immediate and tangible. I use electronic parts as sculptural elements to glimpse what’s usually hidden inside technology: the system itself.”
In The Lurking Void, Phoebe expands her inquiry into science and technology to examine the entanglement of technical systems and the laboring body—workers who keep “efficient” systems running even as they are diluted and erased. Through visual “unveilings,” she brings us closer to the technological core and restores our agency as observers.
As technology and AI streamline workflows, labor is made to seem seamless—until it becomes effectively invisible. Here, “transparency” is not an aesthetic effect but a hidden structure of power, sharpening the politics inside the black box. Against rising anxieties about replacement and unemployment, Phoebe asks: if offices were emptied of people, what would remain—and how might labor continue, furtively and spectrally?
“I give it human-like signs of life—rhythm and breath—while thinking about the workers hidden inside the system. AI relies on countless ‘ghost workers’: real people, just not in offices like typical white-collar staff.”
The exhibition’s central work, Vertebrate, dismantles the body/object relationship embedded in contemporary labor. The office chair, designed to match the curve of the human spine, is a tool of industrial “support” that extends productivity and fits bodies to the job.
Phoebe removes dozens of chairs from beneath the body and rebuilds them in a 6-meter-high space—woven with cables, clear tubing, and T8 fluorescent tubes—into a towering spiral backbone. The relation flips: what once supported the spine becomes the spine that supports the system, visualizing alienation at its extreme.
Text translated from original in Chinese. Courtesy of Art Emperor.
Images: Phoebe Hui, The Lurking Void, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2026 (installation view).
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Phoebe Hui: The Lurking Void | Art Emperor
