Venice exhibition rethinks curating and creativity in the AI era

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the global cultural landscape, a new exhibition in Venice is turning the spotlight toward a pioneering curator whose five-decade career has traced the evolution of contemporary Asian art while raising fresh questions about the future of creativity in the AI era.

Titled Metamorphosis: Beyond the Real. Searching for Victoria Lu – When Humans and AI Think Together, the Story Begins, the major research-based exhibition opened on May 9 at Ca' Foscari Esposizioni in parallel with the 2026 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition centers on Lu, widely regarded as one of Asia's first generation of women curators and one of the earliest Chinese pioneers of contemporary curatorial practice. More than a retrospective, the exhibition positions Lu as both a historical protagonist and an unfinished contemporary subject — one through whom the past, present, and future of curatorial thought may be reconsidered under the emerging conditions of AI.

Born in 1951 into a family steeped in literary and scholarly traditions, Lu displayed artistic talent from an early age. She studied painting as a child, later trained under the lineage of renowned master Zhang Daqian, and eventually continued her education in Europe and the United States before launching a curatorial career in California in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, Lu helped establish the vocabulary and institutional framework of contemporary curatorial practice across the Chinese-speaking art world.

Over the following decades, she played key roles in institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, the MoCA Shanghai, and the Today Art Museum. She also proposed the influential theory of "Animamix," anticipating the growing fusion of visual culture, urban life and digital media.

The Venice exhibition reflects Lu's latest exploration: the relationship between humans and AI in artistic creation. Through archival materials, AI-generated works, moving-image projects and collaborative experiments, the show investigates how curatorial practice may evolve beyond conventional exhibition-making into what Lu describes as "curategist" thinking — a hybrid role combining curating, narration, technology and cultural strategy.

The exhibition will run until Nov 22.