Wenfei Quan '25 Explores Humanity's Relationship With Technology in Solo Exhibition 'Contemporary Hominin' at TaThaTa Gallery

Imagine a prehistoric human suddenly appearing in New York today. They might recognize a phone as an object people use, and perhaps even learn to use it themselves. But they would have no way of understanding the vast systems of electricity, data, communication, infrastructure, and human behavior that make the device possible.

In Contemporary Hominin, a solo exhibition by Visual Arts alum Wenfei Quan '25 at TaThaTa Gallery, Quan likens contemporary humans to prehistoric beings, specifically in how we navigate emerging AI technologies. We are able to engage with these devices, yet we do not fully understand the systems that sustain them or the consequences of their use. The “contemporary hominin” referenced is not an ancient human transported into the present; rather, it is the modern human, faced with emerging technologies whose ecological, developmental, and anthropological risks remain indeterminate.

In the photographic series Mole, Wenfei uses makeup to replicate naturally occurring moles, adding corresponding marks on the opposite side of each sitter's face before photographing them. The slight intervention has a synthetic quality: faces are recognizably individual and human, yet constructed. This act of completion alters the familiarity of their appearance, making visible the irregularity and difference that ordinarily distinguish one face from another.

Familiar Aliens, a print series, begins with color fundus photographs of the artist’s eyes. The retina is the body’s instrument of sight, and here that instrument turns back on itself. Through the slight mirroring and repetition native to printmaking, the images slowly lose their anatomical certainty. Retinal structures take on new shapes, resembling faces, animals, cells, planetary surfaces, or unfamiliar organisms with a life of their own. An image made inside the very organ we see with returns as something at once intimate and alien.

The exhibition’s titular installation, Contemporary Hominin, brings an AI-generated persona into the gallery. Its face is printed on transparent film and placed in front of a video device showing two rotating globes. Looking into the figure’s eyes, the viewer also looks through them, toward the worlds turning on the screen behind. The artificial hominin becomes at once something observed and a device for looking, holding open the distinction between human image, technological construct, and viewer.

Across Mole, Familiar Aliens, and Contemporary Hominin, Quan uses symmetry and repetition not to create perfect likeness, but to make familiar forms strange. A face becomes uncanny when its natural asymmetry is corrected. An image of the retina becomes an unfamiliar organism through repetition. An AI-generated human face becomes a lens through which we encounter the world rather than a straightforward reflection of ourselves.

As Quan shared, "To meet the contemporary world from the position of the hominin is to give up the demand that it resemble us, and to find, in that surrendered symmetry, everything about it that does not."

Wenfei Quan (b. 1992, China) is a conceptual artist and self-described “internet archaeologist” based in New York. She received her MFA in Printmaking from Columbia University School of the Arts.

Quan’s practice centers on what she describes as “Internet Archaeology” and “Human Verification,” responding to the experience of a generation shaped by digital technologies. As algorithms, data, and automated systems increasingly structure everyday life, her work examines shifting notions of human agency and subjectivity. Treating the internet as an emerging archaeological site of contemporary civilization, Quan excavates, translates, and reconstructs digital ruins and online traces through printmaking, sculpture, installation, and moving image, reconsidering the position of the human within increasingly machine-mediated systems.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times and was selected for the Printmaking Exhibition of the 13th National Exhibition of Fine Arts in China. She has received a 2026 EFA residency in New York and a 2026 POWERHOUSE residency fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing (2026); LATITUDE Gallery, New York (2026); 021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair (2025); Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, New York (2025); THE BLANC, New York (2025); Peninsula Art Museum, Shanghai (2024); Shanghai Himalayas Museum (2021); China Printmaking Museum, Shenzhen (2019); and other venues in New York, Milan, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Xi’an, Qingdao, and Hangzhou.

Contemporary Hominin is on view September 11–October 10, 2026, at TaThaTa Gallery on the Lower East Side.