The Antidote

The Antidote brings together multiple strands of Daishi Luo’s long-term artistic research within a single spatial environment. Material transformation, cultivated colour, time-based processes, technological systems and experimental growth unfold across the museum as interconnected conditions rather than separate works. Copper appears simultaneously as infrastructure, archive and reactive medium, linking industrial systems to ecological and bodily processes. Rather than proposing a fixed answer, the exhibition operates as a temporary research environment—part laboratory, part archive, part landscape—in which cultivation, transformation and interaction remain active. Moving through the space, viewers repeatedly return to an unresolved question: What is next? CURATORIAL TEXT Yuting Yang, curator of A4 Art Museum The exhibition showcases Daishi Luo’s long-term interdisciplinary research and artistic practice centered on copper. Marking her first solo exhibition in a museum, The Antidote brings together ten bodies of work that respond to the conditions of the present: amid continuous technological advancement and ongoing social transformation, how can individuals re-examine their relationship with nature and technology under uncertainty, and explore possible mechanisms of synergy and balance among them? Copper, as a material that runs through human civilization, technological development, and the natural world, functions not only as a key component in infrastructure but also carries cultural and ecological attributes. Luo transforms it into a medium that connects nature, technology, and society. For much of modern history, technology has been understood as a tool for controlling nature. From the Industrial Revolution to the digital age, human beings have extended their capacity to intervene in the world through machines, materials, and systems. Yet as ecological crisis, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology accelerate simultaneously, the limits of this one-directional logic of control become increasingly apparent. Technology is no longer merely an instrument of human will, and nature can no longer be treated as a passive resource. What emerges instead is a field of complex relations shaped by interdependence, feedback, and uncertainty. It is within this context that The Antidote adopts healing as a clinical metaphor. Rather than proposing a final solution, the exhibition asks what kind of material foundations “progress” is built upon, and what forms of exhaustion, imbalance, and anxiety accompany technological expansion. Copper, the exhibition’s foundational material, runs through human civilization, technological development, and the natural world. It is both a crucial component of infrastructure and a material that changes with time: it oxidises, discolours, and reacts, continuously recording environmental conditions and material shifts. Since 2015, Daishi Luo has developed a long-term practice around copper through field research, material experimentation, and interdisciplinary investigation. Beginning with her study of copper’s chromatic transformations in industrial design and jewellery, she later travelled to traditional craft workshops in places such as Luoyang, Baoji, Suzhou, and Tongling, tracing vernacular knowledge of how copper can be transformed through local materials and natural agents. These investigations led her to understand copper not as a fixed object, but as a living medium capable of collaborating with natural forces. Over time, Luo developed a working method that brings copper into contact with plant extracts, mineral reactions, seawater, soil, weaving, ceramics, and other craft-based techniques. Drawing from Chinese medicine, material science, chemistry, and biology, she has built a growing archive of copper colour cultivation systems. Since 2018, she has systematically documented these experiments through what she calls “controlled out-of-controlness”: a process in which precise conditions are maintained while the irreproducible elements of time, temperature, humidity, and environmental response are deliberately preserved. To date, this system has generated 528 colour and texture variations, forming the basis of her evolving material language. Within this framework, industrial copper waste is no longer treated simply as a resource to be consumed or discarded. Instead, it re-enters cycles of transformation through the participation of nature and time, producing new colours, crystals, and structures. From colour-skin to crystal-skeleton, Luo’s practice explores how matter can grow across the threshold between surface and structure, image and object, control and emergence. Craft, in this context, is not decorative; it restores human scale to the laboratory and allows nature, people, and technology to function within the same collaborative network. The exhibition unfolds across six spatial chapters and ten new bodies of work. At the entrance, The Network Gate turns copper shielding mesh into a passable threshold. What is next? expands into a ten-metre-long sculptural question about extraction and future possibility. Transformer Lab becomes an active cultivation site where copper, plants, minerals, seawater, and soil generate coloured forms over time. Copper Color Gene Bank systematises these outcomes into an evolving archive of chromatic knowledge. SEED compresses the temporal logic of growth into visible rhythm, while Super Composite Being reanimates technological waste into new hybrid life forms. Mirror of Time-Space, Connection, and Searching for the Antidote return the viewer to the body and to the question of how relations might be rebuilt between human beings, materials, and the systems they inhabit. Ultimately, The Antidote does not seek to establish a new regime of control. Instead, it proposes another possibility: that within increasingly complex systems, human beings may no longer be masters, but participants, mediators, and collaborators. What is being sought is not a final answer, but a new relational structure connecting human beings, nature, technology, and the future.