Future Ancestors was a seminar I curated as part of my MMCA Changdong residency, extending my ongoing research into technodiversity and Asia-futurism. The session explored how artists are reimagining technology beyond Eurocentric frameworks—drawing instead from ancestral lineages, embodied knowledge, and speculative worlding to envision alternative futures.
I was joined by Charmaine Poh (Singapore/Berlin) and Im Youngzoo (South Korea), whose practices investigate how history, memory, and the body mediate our relationship to technology. Poh presented GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY(2021–2023) and introduced THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE, a series of techno-feminist enactments that mine her early experiences as a child actor. Centring intimacy and subversion, her work embraces strategies of deviance, vulnerability, and futurity.
Im reflected on her exhibition Mi Ryeon (2024), developed from her long-term research project Human/I(2021), tracing how belief systems—from religion to pseudoscience—shape our understanding of nature, spirit, and technology. Her work playfully collapses the divide between scientific rationalism and the supernatural, opening up space for reinterpreting knowledge through fiction, metaphor, and myth.
