Installation view of 《Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We?》 © 2026 Art & Technology City

Anthropology began as a discipline for understanding unfamiliar others. Contemporary artists, however, no longer confine the scope of their inquiry to the Other. They expand the field of research to include themselves and their communities, nonhuman beings, and even speculative futures, actively adopting anthropological methods of observation and documentation in the process.

Ethnography, one of the principal methodologies of cultural anthropology, involves closely observing the lives of communities within the geopolitical contexts of specific times and places, at times participating in those communities and recording them from within. Developed by the West during the age of imperialism as a method for studying non-Western societies, ethnography is now undergoing fundamental changes in both its objects of inquiry and modes of approach as the structures and orders of civilization are transformed.

If the question of the previous century, “What is the human?,” presupposed definitions of humanity proposed by evolutionary biology and the social sciences, the contemporary question “Are Humans We?” unsettles those very assumptions and prompts us to reconsider both the boundaries of ‘we’ and the conditions under which such a question can be formulated.

The three axes that have constituted civilization—the natural environment, urban culture, and technological development—are now being reorganized into a new order as they become entangled with artificial intelligence developed by humanity, newly synthesized material environments, previously invisible nonhuman beings, and planetary conditions.

These transformations have accelerated through the global turning points of the pandemic and the climate crisis, leading to a fundamental shift in the contemporary art environment in which art and technology do more than simply combine, instead conditioning and transforming one another. Positioned at the center of this transition, the exhibition identifies artists not simply as cultural producers but as active agents investigating technological, environmental, and social conditions—in other words, as contemporary Anthropologists.

Their inquiry is no longer limited to observing an external Other. Its scope extends to the otherness embedded within themselves and their communities, newly identified nonhuman beings and planetary conditions beyond anthropocentric ontology, anthropomorphized technologies and endlessly proliferating artificial objects, as well as futures yet to arrive and temporalities preceding human experience.


Installation view of 《Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We?》 © 2026 Art & Technology City

The exhibition 《Doing Anthropology: Are Humans We?》 is a temporary field that condenses into a single time and space the processes of artistic research and technological collaboration accumulated through gatherings and workshops held from last spring until recently, revealing the complex and multifaceted landscapes of humanity that emerged through them.

Based on audiovisual archives constructed from sensations, data, narratives, and technological mediations collected from their own lives and environments, the participating artists sought to compose their own ethnographies. These artistic ethnographies move beyond simple observation and documentation, functioning as contemporary analytical languages reconstructed within technological conditions that traverse artificial intelligence, interfaces, data structures, and networks.

At the same time, through fundamental human actions and repetitive forms of labor such as walking, following, speaking, listening, writing, and erasing, the artists seek to renew their understanding of the world, themselves, and what lies beyond established boundaries. Within Korean society, where ethnic homogeneity and socially agreed systems of meaning exert a particularly strong influence, such an approach redirects the gaze from the outside toward a renewed observation of the inside.

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