Pinky Swear

Solo show

Tabula Rasa Gallery London
13 October – 29 November 2025
Opening: Saturday, 18 October 2025, 6-8 PM

Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to present “Pinky Swear,” a solo exhibition by aaajiao, opening 13 October 2025 at our London space. Featuring new installations and moving image works, the exhibition examines loneliness, nationalism, and the echo chambers of digital culture. From 25 September to 19 October, aaajiao will also be in London for an artist residency with the gallery.

Centering on the increasingly mainstream “cyber-nationalism” across the Simplified Chinese internet and the intensifying “profound loneliness” under algorithmic governance, a suite of new works composes moving-image and installation narratives that map today’s affective —political ecology. The exhibition treats the exhibition space as an “affect amplifier,” and, within the echo chambers of social media, recommendation systems, and digital communities, interrogates the deep psychological and structural drivers of the global rise of the right.

Grounded in research and narrated through artworks, the project shows how passive social media use, platformed life, and identity politics together produce an epochal condition that is “connection” in name yet “separation” in practice—becoming ever lonelier amid hyper-connectivity. Growing from this condition is cyber-nationalism, operating through affective mobilization, enemy–ally framing, and echo-chamber dynamics; it functions both as psychic consolation and political activation, and forms a key grain in today’s “digital psyche.”

Research indicates that doom-scrolling, performative comparison, and vicarious interaction on the internet and social media systematically heighten loneliness, entangling it with polarization, authoritarian leanings, and intergroup hostility. Europe-wide surveys further suggest a strong association between passive social media use and loneliness, whereas “active interaction” (e.g., instant messaging) correlates far less—implying that how one uses social media matters more than how long one spends on it. On the Simplified Chinese internet, emotion-driven nationalist discourse and algorithmically produced filter bubbles co-amplify one another, making identity imaginaries and the mobilization of enmity more efficient and self-reinforcing.

The exhibition follows a three-part arc— “loneliness—belonging—mobilization”: from the depletion and compensations of individual affect, through the instant solidarities of virtual communities, to the mobilization and politicization of collective feeling—an intensifying loop of recursive amplification. Within this circuit, platforms organize attention via recommendation algorithms, while the works unpick their semantic and sensory architectures, laying bare the mechanism by which “connection manufactures loneliness.”

- Algorithmic governance and the echo chamber: Recommendation systems steer users toward denser, more homogeneous enclaves, narrowing the informational spectrum and amplifying affective gradients of affiliation and antagonism. Inside such filter bubbles, complex issues are flattened into stock narrative templates, and emotion becomes both the passport and the currency of participation.
- Imagined community and “Little Pink”: Predominantly young, a new generation of online nationalists builds pro-nation narratives through social media and an emoji-semiotics, demonstrating the organizing power of affective identification and the disintermediated momentum of dissemination.
- Passive spectatorship and profound loneliness: Doom-scrolling, lurking, and social comparison erode the quality of face-to-face interaction, producing a coexistence of “instant bustle” and “deep solitude,” and making individuals more vulnerable to affective politics.

- Guard, I… / 保安，我…: A silicone figure modeled on the artist’s own body sits in a guard’s pose, suspended between the smallest units of power and personal exhaustion, refracting the post-pandemic reality of “micro-power” and the solitude of shift-work.
- Squab / 乳鸽: Anti-bird spikes paired with squab models form a visual paradox, exposing the misalignments and prejudices among “food—symbol—identity,” and pointing to cultural memory and othering in migration contexts.
- Sunbathing? Not dead. / 晒太阳呢，没死: Translating an internet meme into a sculptural presence, the work makes palpable the “irreducibly human” that eludes algorithmic inference, giving loneliness a physical contour through contingency and absence.
- Nobody / 啥都不是: Rendering into object form a 3D “Asian male” dataset common online, like an anonymous “ID of loneliness,” the work exposes the tension between datafication’s anonymization and the tagging of identity.
- ai ai ai / 爱爱爱: “Meaningless memes” are embroidered onto silk handkerchiefs, threading faint gestures of mutual aid and calls for help into a provisional rope of affect—an answer to the imaginaries of self-rescue under passive spectatorship.
- Absurd Reality Check / 荒诞现实检测: Through a video collage of “two rituals/one ritual,” de-facialized mannequins, and the idiom of livestream subcultures, the work recomposes a contemporary ritualism linking “folk spirituality—platform economy—intergenerational livelihood.”

Taking installations, moving images, and algorithmically generated mistranslation as a “perceptual assembly line,” the exhibition juxtaposes text, memes, and corporeal materials to engineer a deliberate desynchrony between meaning and affect, inviting viewers to locate both the mirror and the fissures of platformed life in the asynchronous. Through recurring motifs of ritual, sampling, and specimen logics, the works concretize the loop of “being seen—self-seeing—mutual seeing,” approaching the genesis of affective politics.
The current rise of the right is not an isolated ideological turn, but a syndrome produced jointly by digital loneliness, institutional distrust, and algorithmic polarization—with affective belonging supplying the psychological engine of mobilization. Nationalist expression on the Simplified Chinese internet and the echo-chamber logics of Western social media is mechanistically resonant, pointing to a coexistence of cross-cultural structural isomorphism and local difference.

Treating “emotion as evidence,” the exhibition uses material, scale, and audiovisual rhythm to guide viewers along a perceptual trajectory from individual loneliness to collective outcry and onward to political mobilization—deliberately “losing focus” between the acts of gazing and being gazed at. Rather than offering conclusions, the exhibition operates as a “reality stress test,” probing how platform grammar shapes the contemporary “we” at the levels of both body and narrative.


ABOUT THE ARTIST

aaajiao (b.1984, Xi’an, China) now lives and works in Shanghai and Berlin. The artist and activist aaajiao—the online handle of Xu Wenkai—draws on a broad range of languages including sculpture, painting, drawing, multimedia installation, video, sound and design to explore the evolution of the human identity being assimilated by the digital world. Focusing on the experience of the new generation—the native inhabitant of the parallel worlds and saturated realities of the net—aaajiao’s work is a critical investigation into the countless possibilities offered by the digital and the numerous questions raised by this hyper-technologization.
 
aaajiao’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, His recent solo exhibitions include: Pinky Swear, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2025); A bit A prompt, SETAREH (Berlin, 2024); membrane, Star Museum (Shanghai, 2023); Diaspora as History, Liste with Tabula Rasa Gallery (Basel, 2022); I was dead on the Internet, Wannsee Contemporary (Berlin, 2022); I was dead on the Internet, Lianhua Apartment (Shanghai, 2021); Deep Simulator, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2021); Deep Simulator, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2020) ; URL is LOVE - A Digital Retrospective, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2020); Cave Simulator, Aike (Shanghai, 2020); a’a’a’jiao: an ID, HOW Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); bot, House of Egorn (Berlin, 2018); Gluttony, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space (Chengdu, 2018); User, Love, High-frequency Trading, Leo Xu Projects (Shanghai, 2017); Remnants of an Electronic Past, CFCCA (Manchester, 2016) etc.  

Selected group exhibitions include: Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong 2025); Global Fascism, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin，2025) ; AI,As Seen at the End of Ownership, times museum,(Guangdong，2025); Topologies of the Real Techne 2025, MICA Art Museum Gallery 3&4 (Hunan，2025);目 Chine Une nouvelle génération d'artistes, Centre Pompidou, (Paris, 2024); NUWORLDS, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Australia, 2024); MULTIPLY!!!: Power in Numbers in Contemporary Chinese Art, Modern Art Museum (Shanghai, 2024);Bordercrossing, Possibilities and Interactions, Yuz Museum (Shanghai, 2023); Topologies of the Real: Techne, Shenzhen, Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning (Shenzhen, 2023); Symphony of All the Changes: The 7th Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art （Guangzhou, 2023); Cloud Walkers, Leeum Museum of Art (Seoul, 2022); Forming Communities: Berliner Wege, KINDL (Berlin, 2022); NADA Miami 2022 Art Fair, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Miami, 2022); Boomerang: OCAT Biennale, OCAT Shenzhen (Shenzhen, 2021); The Return of Guests - Selections from the PSA Collection, Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum (Shanghai, 2019); Afterimage: Dangdai Yishu, Lisson Gallery (London, 2019); Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today, The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, 2018); Love Love Love, Today Art Museum (Beijing, 2018); Ethics of Technology, Beijing Media Art Biennale (Beijing, 2016)  

In 2023 and 2024, aaajiao's work was collected by the Pompidou Center in France. In 2014, he not only won the 3rd Art Sanya Awards Jury Prize, but also was shortlisted for the 1st OCAT Pierre Huber Prize.