I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK
Installation view of I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK. Photo by Tianhao Shi. Courtesy of the artist and the curators.
When “That’s OK” Becomes a Demand
Review of the group exhibition I'm a Cyborg, But That’s OK at Aunty's House, Providence, RI
by Xumeng Zhang, June 3, 2026
When I first entered I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, I did not think of metal, prosthetics, or any technology-enhanced, futuristic body. What came to mind first was the quiet pressure carried by the phrase “that’s OK.” It sounds gentle, permissive, consoling. Yet in life, being “OK” is not always a neutral condition. It can imply that loss of control has been managed, emotion regulated, and the body returned to function. In other words, “that’s OK” often means: you may be unwell for now, but you had better be getting better.
It is within this tension that curators Shuhan Zhang and April Liu detach the cyborg from its familiar science fiction imagery. Here, the cyborg is not simply a body modified or upgraded. It is an unresolved mode of being: confused, repetitive, useless, and at times cute, fragile, excessive, or illegible. In this exhibition, the cyborg becomes less a technological category than an ethical question about normalcy, affect, care, and recognition. When an individual fails to meet the standards of the coherent, rational, productive, and legible human, can that individual still be allowed to exist?
This line of inquiry naturally recalls the New Museum’s recent exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which approached the “new human” through automation, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and technological history. A friend’s response to that exhibition stayed with me. Not trained in art, she understood that its discomfort was intentional, but admitted that she does not always go to art museums to be educated or pushed into high intellectual alert. Her response was not anti-intellectual. It exposed a contradiction in many exhibitions about “new humans” and cyborgs - while they critique the rationality and control that define the human, they can still require viewers to remain lucid, disciplined, and constantly interpretive.
By contrast, I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK works on a lower, more intimate register. It narrows the question to emotion, vulnerability, and states that have not been repaired. It returns the grand discourse of the “new human” to a slower and more affective frame.The cyborg here is not the future body foregrounded by technological history, nor the neon city and prosthetic fantasy of cyberpunk. It is a being that cannot be stably classified: at times human, at times object, at times machine, and at times a fragment suspended in dream, archive, or feeling.
Olivia Saporito’s installations most directly engage the exhibition’s machinic language. Steel, found frames, soil, old photographs, enlarger parts, mirrors, lenses, slide carriers, and motors form obsolete machines for looking. Rather than pointing toward a sleek future, they stage image-making as a worn, unstable process, in which photographs become memory, evidence, or residue through apparatus and frame. Here, the cyborg refers to a hybrid body and a hybrid mode of seeing. The viewer’s eye, the apparatus, and the material history of the photograph form an unstable system of vision. What appears is not a complete person, but an intermediate state assembled from machinery, archive, and perception.
If Saporito brings the exhibition into the structure of mechanized looking, Silvia Muleo and Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee turn that question toward the face, the photograph, and the afterimage. Muleo’s Me.Me.Me., Blur, and Double Exposure already suggest an image repeatedly seen, layered, and thrown out of focus. Her paintings do not confirm a stable subject. Instead, they seem to translate the residue of photographs, screens, selfies, or overexposed images back into the language of oil paint. Lee’s One Face on Thousands Postcards further places the face within systems of reproduction and archive. When one face appears across thousands of postcards, it no longer functions as the center of identity. It becomes a visual remnant, dispersed, recomposed, and wrapped in historical material. In their works, the human face loses its stable role as proof of the human. These works unsettle that faith. The face can be an afterimage on a screen or a fragment in an archive; it can be the surface of feeling or a trace left by technology and repeated viewing. The “human” in the exhibition is not confirmed through portraiture, but reconfigured through delay, error, and incompletion.
Sherly Fan pushes this instability further into affect itself. The cuteness, hearts, fake gems, candy-like ornaments, and buoyant tone in these works are not merely sweet surfaces. Instead, they give formal presence to feelings often dismissed as childish, excessive, or unserious. In many art contexts, emotion must be translated into a language mature, restrained, and critical enough to be taken seriously. Vulnerability must be conceptualized, sadness structured, cuteness defended against charges of superficiality, and feminized ornament explained as a strategy. Fan’s works do not attempt to cleanse these feelings of their so-called childishness. She lets the heart remain a heart and cuteness remains cute. Her abstraction is therefore not a retreat into form, but an affective resistance to functional language: feeling does not need to be cured into rationality before it is allowed to enter art.
This is why the exhibition’s phrase “care replaces cure” lands as more than a gentle curatorial statement. Cure can carry a demand to return to legibility, function, and social acceptability. Care, by contrast, asks us to remain with what has not been resolved, without making recovery the price of recognition. The exhibition’s central question is not whether the cyborg can still be considered human, but whether the “normal” human should remain the measure of what deserves care. Its “low intensity declaration of existence” lies precisely here: useless, blurred, and dreamlike states need not justify themselves through transformation or cure. This proposition also extends to spectatorship. The viewer does not have to become a lucid, efficient subject producing meaning on demand. The work may remain unresolved, and the viewer need not master it immediately. Care begins there, in the permission not to resolve too quickly.
Installation view of I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK. Photo by Tianhao Shi. Courtesy of the artist and the curators.
To Fall Into Reverie, Without Reserve
——Art Review of 'I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK'
by Rachel Zheng, June 3, 2026
'I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK', on view at Aunty's House Studios in Providence, brings together five artists — Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, Sherly Fan, Silvia Muleo, Olivia Saporito, and Phoebe Quin Kong — curated by April Liu and Shuhan Zhang around what they describe as a "low-power and non-restorative mode of existence," a condition drawn from Park Chan-wook's film and Eunjung Kim's ethics of "Unbecoming Human." What holds the exhibition together is not a shared formal language but something felt before it is understood — pseudo-fairytale dream states, mild malfunction, the quiet sufficiency of simply continuing. We notice it in the way works don't resolve, the way materials sit with their own contradictions, the way the space itself seems to breathe at a lower register. In contexts where divergent forms of being are so often framed as problems awaiting correction, the exhibition refuses the logic of repair. It does not ask its subjects to be optimized or returned to normalcy; it asks only that they persist. And slowly, without announcement, it asks the same of us.
Along the wall, three paintings unfold as a sequence of pictorial dislocation. Sherly Fan's Above us is only sky — Rene Magritte's dream is not mine (or it could be) (2024) opens the passage with the airy blue of an open sky; by the time the eye reaches Fan's This is a heart (2026), that blue has warmed into something more bodily, more insistent, oil and thread and fake gem beads pressed into canvas as if feeling itself needed to be fastened down. Between them, Silvia Muleo's Blur (2025) interrupts the drift like a held breath: a small grey canvas ringed in a sliver of neon yellow that sits slightly off, like a frame that has slipped its own edges — or a cordon drawn not to keep danger out, but to mark where something quietly refuses to be contained. It simply sits there, slightly out of key, slightly too still.
Muleo's Me.Me.Me. I, II, III (2024) continue this logic of gentle estrangement, three small paintings distributed across two walls, echoing and estranging each other in equal measure — fragments of a mirror that cannot quite agree on what they reflect. In the narrow corner they form with Double Exposure (2026), the space itself becomes part of the work: the unstretched canvas hangs loose from two clips, neither fully taut nor fully at rest, and the enclosure presses the act of looking inward. It multiplies, drifts slightly out of alignment, and holds the viewer suspended between likeness and illusion — with nowhere left to step back.
On the rustic wooden floor, Olivia Saporito's Beyond Surface (2024) sits apart: acrylic lens, slide carrier, steel, and soil coexisting without striving toward unity. It evokes an obsolete, non-digital mechanism of looking, one in which vision is always mediated, always separated from its object by a layer it cannot dissolve. Images exist here but remain suspended, never fully arriving. Past it, Phoebe Kong's Drawing Series operates on an entirely different frequency. Her loose, gestural marks refuse to be pinned down by their placement; orange set against blue demands attention on its own terms, coherent and unapologetic. Where Saporito withholds, Kong insists. And yet both arrive at the same place: opacity and incompletion not as failures of communication, but as its most honest forms.
Where most exhibitions assign their walls as neutral containers, Sharon Lee's One Face on Thousands Postcards (2024–2025) finds something more accidental and more apt — settling into the space's architectural protrusions as if they were always meant to be frames. There is something quietly funny about this, and something right. The wooden frame on the right echoes the surrounding architecture, enclosing rice-constructed photographs, inkjet on mulberry silk, and 1900s postcards that hold time in a pause, neither preserved nor released. To the left, faces expand in scale until they blur into something more diffuse, pulling viewers into a state of simultaneously gazing and being gazed upon. The act of looking is never neutral here; the space itself participates in a condition where structure persists without fully resolving into purpose.
‘I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK’ arrives at a quietly radical proposition: that existence need not justify itself through functionality, recovery, or the performance of the human. Dreams, in this context, are not escapes. They are internal operating systems that keep running when human standards momentarily give out. The exhibition's most tender claim may be its simplest: that's OK.
Installation view of I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK. Photo by Tianhao Shi. Courtesy of the artist and the curators.