'Tishan Hsu: emergent mesh' Screening at Metrograph, New York, 19 June
5 June 2026
Book Tickets Here
On Friday 19 June, coinciding with the New Museum’s current exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, Metrograph presents a screening event featuring Tishan Hsu, whose work will be presented alongside David Cronenberg. Together, their practices offer distinct perspectives on the relationship between bodies and technology, exploring the ways in which the human form is reshaped, extended and transformed by technological systems.
Tishan Hsu’s emergent mesh (2025) a real-time video produced in a game engine, explores a completely different vision. The world it presents is an unsettling landscape of abstracted textures animated by miniature screen-like shapes. Viewers are made to feel like they were exploring the cellular tissues of a body imagined by a computer; digital, yet eerily human.
In David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999) a virtual reality game designer is hunted by extremists who believe her new game threatens reality itself. In Cronenberg's film, virtual reality is indistinguishable from the real world.
What unites these works is this fusion between physical and digital worlds. Both artists reject the binary between body and technology, instead highlighting the organic, textural and flesh-like qualities of the technologies they portray. Cronenberg does this through special effects, prosthetics, and wearable technologies like umbilical bio ports. Hsu accomplishes similar effects through his sculptural, pulsating, flesh-like textures and forms. In both works, the body is a technology, flesh is a medium, and the line between game and art, real and virtual is not just blurred, it's enmeshed.
Friday June 19, 8:30–9:30pm
New Museum Theater, Metrograph, New York
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Image: Still of emergent mesh, 2025 © 2026 North First Studio / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
