I'm Not an Alien?
June 10 - June 17, 2026
13 Grattan St, #402, Brooklyn, NY, 11206
New York, NY — A Space Gallery is pleased to present I’m Not an Alien?, a group exhibition curated by Yichen Ji, featuring works by Cai Charlotte Fei, Liwenyi Zhang, Luyi Wang, Shiqi Zeng, Yichen Ji, Yicheng (“IX”) Sun, and Zhihan Liu. Bringing together image, object, installation, sound, interaction, fictional narrative, wearable media, and mixed media, the exhibition examines the alien not simply as a figure from outer space, but as a condition of perception, projection, documentation, and estrangement. Across bodies, machines, signals, domestic narratives, and systems of interpretation, the works locate alienness within the technologies and stories through which we understand the unknown.
The exhibition does not ask whether aliens exist. Instead, it asks why we keep looking up, and what we project into the sky when the image is blurry, the document is redacted, and the answer never fully arrives. Across image, object, installation, sound, interaction, and fictional narrative, the works on view approach alienness as something both distant and intimate: a body, a signal, a machine, a landscape, a glitch, or a presence just outside the frame.
The exhibition begins with Yichen Ji’s Synthetic Genesis, a futuristic payphone that allows visitors to call fictional AI personas through a printed directory. Recasting the familiar ritual of making a phone call as an act of creation, the work asks how intimacy, trust, and companionship might emerge between humans and synthetic life.
In Luyi Wang’s Forecasting Forecasts, uncertainty turns toward the future of reproduction, family, and adulthood. Through beeswax, digital display, and custom software, the work reflects on how younger generations imagine future life under economic pressure, medical systems, and continuous prediction. Yicheng (“IX”) Sun’s Untitled (21 Apertures) shifts this anxiety into the image itself, showing how a photograph becomes evidence through machine vision, institutional language, and systems of interpretation.
Cai Charlotte Fei’s Gone turns alienation toward the residue of everyday life. A chair holds the shape of a body without the body itself, its surface carrying the faded trace of presence. Abstracted from context, the familiar becomes difficult to recognize, asking what separates what belongs from what appears foreign. Shiqi Zeng’s IMPROV turns sound into visible matter, using vibration, sand, projection, and human movement to create a feedback loop between body, material, and computation.
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In Liwenyi Zhang’s Parasite, an alien-like wearable headpiece becomes a metaphor for algorithmic media systems that attach themselves to desire, attention, and autonomy. What appears useful or comforting slowly becomes controlling. Zhihan Liu’s A Home Only without Me expands alienness into a magical realist family narrative, inviting participants to investigate domestic scenes shaped by inheritance, reincarnation, and nonhuman perspectives.
Together, the works in I’m Not an Alien? locate the alien not only in the sky, but within the systems, bodies, technologies, and stories that shape how we understand the unknown. Alienness, here, is not a fixed identity, but a relation between observer and observed, human and machine, body and record, signal and interpretation. If we look upward and call the unknown alien, perhaps somewhere else, another intelligence is looking back at us.
Opening View
