DE SARTHE is pleased to present Soul Light Legacy Plan, its fourth solo exhibition by Shanghai-based artist Wang Xin that posits itself as a fictional service agency that provides what humans have coveted for centuries – immortality. Unveiling a new body of interrelated sculptural, multimedia, and interactive installations, the immersive exhibition appears as if a showroom of unusual artefacts imagined to preserve spiritual consciousness via the technological avant-garde. Soul Light Legacy Plan opens March 22ndand runs through May 17th.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors will find themselves in an ambiguous environment that simultaneously recalls a space for meditative retreat and a showroom for cutting-edge technological devices. Checking in at the front desk, any visitor can become a participant of the program by registering for an account on the agency’s official website. In the different areas of the space, varied installation and multimedia artworks form an array of curious stations, each representing a stage or step in the service’s alleged preservation process. The artworks juxtapose the organic and natural with the cold and mechanical, constructing a futuristic narrative wherein the human subconscious can be replicated and stored digital forms, creating what the agency calls ”spiritual legacy”.

Asking visitors to perform physical tasks such as scanning books and meditating, the agency proposes a standard ritual that translates and encodes personal tactile and sensory experiences into algorithmic data. As participants interact with the artworks, accents of artificiality become increasingly evident in the objects and processes that the fictitious agency presents as human or spiritual. An underlying suspicion emerges as to whether the exercises are leading one unknowingly onto an irreversible path toward digital anxiety and artificial crises.

To the artist, the mission and business viability of Soul Light Legacy Plan is founded either on the human desire to live forever or the fear of being forgotten after death. Packaging spirituality and legacy as a luxury service, Wang creates a hyperbolic yet reflective statement regarding the factorization as well as commodification of inherent human qualities under the guise of technological advancement. Moreover, the exhibition envisions a future in which private information, to the extent of subconscious thoughts, will be voluntarily offered to technology regardless of its hidden agendas in exchange for the reaffirmation of existence and promises of the future. Carefully crafting a corporate façade, veiled under technological jargon and dressed in a mindful and soothing aesthetic, the artist not only points at the artful lures of the digital era, but questions the social docility and comfort nurtured by the temptations of contemporary technology.