By Xiaoquan (Chelsea) Zhong
In Art and the After-Culture, Ben Davis suggests that visual art in the age of the after-culture is increasingly diverging into three distinct tendencies.[1] Following his line of thought, I have tried to identify three corresponding artistic cases that resonate with these categories. Before rushing to define it, it might be more meaningful to first observe what is being recognized as art in our current context. With this in mind, I turn to three cases in an attempt to render Ben Davis’s three trends more tangible and perceptible.
Art institutions oriented toward middle-class leisure consumption had a good run as purveyors of contemporary adult theme-park attractions, integrated into an increasingly fluid and mobile world of “experience”- based technological leisure.
This is tendency A.
I chose teamLab as a case for tendency A which is both representative and, in many ways, extreme. teamLab (founded in 2001) is an international art collective. Their collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. This immensely popular digital art collective is devoted to immersive exhibitions, bringing together artists, animators, architects, programmers, and other specialists to construct intricate, multi-sensory environments. Today, teamLab has expanded across the globe, with major sites such as teamLab Planets TOKYO and teamLab Borderless in Tokyo. Beyond standalone exhibitions, their works have also entered institutional contexts through collaborations with organizations like the National Gallery of Victoria and Pace Gallery.
I find it difficult to articulate exactly what these exhibitions are “about.” Perhaps this elusiveness is precisely their defining quality—they operate through abstraction, demanding to be experienced rather than explained. Or perhaps content itself has become secondary; viewers may willingly overlook meaning, focusing instead on the act of visiting and the intensity of the visual encounter. You must browse their website and be overwhelmed by its dazzling imagery, but it is only through physical presence that one truly begins to grasp the experience.
In tracing immersive exhibitions, I noticed that even those centered on Vincent van Gogh alone have proliferated in the Netherlands in various forms. For instance, the Van Gogh Immersive Experience Utrecht and Fabrique des Lumières in Amsterdam-West both present such projects. Van Gogh and Rembrandt in Amsterdam promotes itself as “an immersive experience in Amsterdam unlike any other, and an unforgettable journey that stimulates all your senses[2].” This leads to the broader question surrounding immersive art: is it merely a fleeting display of technological spectacle[3]?
Recently, I visited an immersive exhibition space in Amsterdam with a friend, though the experience was far from satisfying. We went with expectations created by the intricate, enigmatic visual world of Hieronymus Bosch,[4] thinking that it could not be better to enter his surreal and densely constructed pictorial universe. However, the reality was disappointing. The so-called ‘mmersive’ experience consisted merely of a few poorly splicing projection screens. On the positive side, we were shown a detailed interpretative video of Bosch’s works; yet, all the videos were AI-generated (obviously). I remain somewhat skeptical of this approach. For an exhibition that relies on moving images as an experiential medium, such a fully AI-driven production process seems to significantly weaken the audience’s emotional resonance. The only moment that felt genuinely engaging was a brief VR headset experience included in the ticket.
I am not attempting to critique immersive exhibitions as such. I remain curious about and open to those I have yet to encounter. This is precisely why I believe the ‘presence’ of immersive experiences is so important, as well as their inherent uncertainty—you never truly know what kind of sensation they promise until you are physically there.
If we trace its development backward from today’s most popular forms of digital art, it becomes clear that almost all contemporary artistic practices are shaped by a crucial shift from “object” to “concept.” Since then, art no longer emphasizes the materiality of the object, and increasingly questions the institutions and systems of the art world.
This type of art provides the basis for status networks to cement a common ruling-class sense of identity and destiny. Secret rituals and private emblems, deliberately inaccessible to a broad public, reanimating the sense of personal mission for the entitled – art lives on in this way.
This is tendency B.
Comedian at Art Basel Miami Beach
When it comes to the second trend, the first example that comes to mind is the conceptual work Comedian[5] which is a fresh banana duct taped to the wall. Even if this isn’t a perfectly suitable example, Comedian cleverly reveals how this mechanism works. To the average audience, it seems utterly absurd; however, for those within it, the work reveals the representative characteristics of a “shared esoteric code.” Created in 2019 by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, the piece was released in an edition of three. Two were sold for $120,000 each at Art Basel, while the third reached $150,000.
What provoked even greater discussion than the work itself is the absurd chain of events surrounding its central element—the banana. Originally purchased for just 25 cents each from a fruit vendor in New York City, Shah Alam, the banana has since been repeatedly “consumed” across contexts. In 2023, at the Leeum Museum of Art, a student visitor casually ate it without consequence. In 2024, the work was auctioned for $6.2 million to the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, who also proceeded to eat it . As a result, the Centre Pompidou-Metz remarked that, for now, it may well be “the most-eaten artwork of the last 30 years[6].”
Unexpectedly, I encountered a curious coincidence last week at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, however, it is Yes! We Have No Bananas, which is a work of Barbara Visser’s exhibition Superposition. In it, she references Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan and replaces the banana with a sketchbook by the Dutch painter Isaac Israëls.[7]
Yes! We Have No Bananas II at Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Photo by the author
What intrigued me was that, when I later searched for the work online, the image shown on her website, featuring a sketchbook page taped to the wall, which looked entirely different from what I had seen in the museum. As I tried to make sense of this discrepancy, I revisited the exhibition label I had photographed, only to realize that the piece on display was in fact Yes! We Have No Bananas II, marked as a “unique piece.”[8]
screenshot from Barbara Visser’s website
Like that “banana”. At this point, the superposition of concepts, the superposition of originals and reproductions, the layering of creations, between authorship, reproduction and interpretation, sparks a renewed reflection on art.
Culture can only re-form once again in secret, in coalition with a fresh carde of the oppressed, keeping the memory of the broken struggles alive. Artists be in to invent anew, despite the unsparing spectacle of repression.
This is tendency C.
For the third trend, I want to foreground practices of artistic resistance. I chose the Canton-based collective BOLOHO . It began in 2019 from a very concrete and immediate need that two women sought to carve out a space where they could momentarily step outside existing structures. With the gradual involvement of others, this initial impulse evolved into a collaborative structure embedded within a community. In an old residential neighborhood in Guangzhou, they established a loosely organized yet continuously operating platform under the model of a “business,” reweaving work and life, the individual and the collective, sustained through principles of equality, self-discipline, and mutual support.
The BOLOHO Living Room. Photo by the artists.
Their attention turns to forms of labour that are constantly absorbed into daily life yet rarely acknowledged—cooking, planting, sewing, caregiving[9], and cohabitation. Rather than producing clearly defined artistic outcomes, their practice repeatedly circles around a question: within the constraints of reality, how can people still work and live together, and in doing so, generate new forms of relation?
BOLOHO Portrait. Photo by the artists.
In Cantonese BOLOHO refers to the seed of a jackfruit—a part often discarded, yet still edible. The name itself operates as a metaphor for their methodology: to rediscover overlooked values and transform them into new resources through collective labour.
At documenta fifteen, the concept of “lumbung” was proposed by ruangrupa,[10] a concept that reoriented artistic production toward shared resources and the reorganization of social relations. BOLOHO was invited to Kassel in 2022, where they created a space combining food, labour, and moving image. Their mini-sitcom BOLOHOPE, along with collective drawing and temporary dining practices, intertwined humor with everyday experience, positioning art not as something to be viewed, but as a structure to be lived.
BOLOHOPE 2022. Screenshot from the video.
They also curated and edited The BOLOHO Series, bringing together one-minute films by 18 artists and filmmakers from around the world. The project stems from the The One Minutes initiative by Het Nieuwe Instituut—a global platform linking experimental video and art education, compressing and activating expression within an extremely short temporal frame.
BOLOHO, Hanart TZ Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong 2023. Photo by Kitmin Lee.
In 2024, their “Seed to Textile[11]” project at CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) further extended this practice into the social realm. Using overseas Chinese farms as an entry point, they traced histories of Hong Kong migration and plant circulation since the 1950s, weaving together agriculture, textiles, and memory. Participants, including audiences, students, and community members, were drawn into collaborative processes ranging from planting and dye-making to sewing, video production, and performance. Each form of participation engages with questions of identity, cultural inheritance, and emotional connection.
Walter Benjamin writes: “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form.”[14] The general public tends to seek entertainment in artworks, whereas others approach them with focused attention and contemplation. “Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament.”[15] Whether we are the general public or art enthusiasts is no longer a clearly defined distinction in the after-culture. It could be lying back on a soft beanbag in an immersive exhibition space, or booking a day ticket just to be part of Art Basel, or a resident in Guangzhou dropping by the third-floor BOLOHO living room on a leisurely afternoon, fanning themselves and having tea, like a daily neighborhood chat as usual.Each of these is simply one possible way of being.
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Notes:
[1] In Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2022), Ben Davis argues that “what used to be called ‘visual art’ has today split into three distinct tendencies”. After-culture is “the mode of cultural production and consumption related to the new pattern of political and economic power that has consolidated in the wake of the last decade’s turbulence.” https://www.benadavis.com/after-culture
[2] Van Gogh and Rembrandt in Amsterdam, immersive exhibition: https://vangoghinamsterdam.com/en.
[3]Media studies scholar Huang has published an article titled “Is Immersive Art a Buzzword, or an Essential ‘Innovative Concept’?”, in which she critically examines the current proliferation of immersive art practices and questions whether they represent a meaningful artistic paradigm or merely a contemporary cultural buzzword. https://mag.clab.org.tw/clabo-article/immersive-art/
[4] Hieronymus Bosch, was a prolific Dutch painter of the 15th and 16th centuries. Most of his paintings depict sin and the decline of human morality. Bosch used demons, half-human, half-beast figures, and even machines to represent human evil. His paintings are complex, highly original, imaginative, and make extensive use of various symbols and allegories.
[5] Comedian, a 2019 artwork by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Created in an edition of three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)
[6] Centre-Pompidou Metz said in the statement, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/21/style/maurizio-cattelan-banana-eaten-again-scli-intl
[7] Isaac Israëls (1865-1934), a Dutch painter associated with the Amsterdam Impressionism movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Isra%C3%ABls
[8] As the exhibition label shows: Yes! We have no bananas today II, 2026 – Sketchbook. duct tape – Unique piece – Courtesy of the artist – Sketches by Isaac Israels.
[9] Artists-in-Residence 2024 BOLOHO, on The Mill 6 Chat website, https://www.mill6chat.org/zh-hant/artist/2024-boloho
[10] ruangrupa, a collective founded in 2000 and based in Jakarta, Indonesia, is a non-profit organization. https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/about/
[11] Seed to Textile, a community programme launched by CHAT, To explore the intrinsic relationship between textiles and the environment. https://www.themills.com.hk/en/event/seed-to-textile-2024-boloho-open-studio/
[12] Each textile dons a different design and photograph. Five unique scarves in total, each sold separately. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/67330/
[13] Article about BOLOHO at Documenta Fifteen 2022 and Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 https://www.theartjournal.cn/archives/exhibitions/95705
[14] Quotes from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.
[15] Ibid.