City Of Apparition
Chapter 1: The Rupture

Friday, August 25th, 2026
12:00pm-6:00pm, Timed
RSVP Essential

• Shu-Kai Lin & Wayne Ashley, FuturePerfect Studio.
• Elevated Matter & Chris Davies, Host Ambassadors.

You stand before an alleyway.

It implodes.

What remains are fragments—blocks, molds, pieces of a vanished place. You begin to assemble them, not to restore what was lost, but to make something else.

As it takes shape, the world shifts. The objects lift. The space opens.

You are no longer where you started.

The Rupture is the first part of City Of Apparition, a six-chapter mixed reality installation exploring the condition of unhoming—the rupture that occurs when the histories, structures, and places that anchor us begin to disappear. The work grew from Lin’s experience of the demolition of his childhood home in Taiwan, transforming a personal history of loss into a larger meditation on displacement, memory, and what might be created from what remains.

The Hudson Eye presented an early prototype of The Rupture in 2025. The work returns in 2026 in its completed form, announcing 1 of the 6 chapters, iteratively, in partnership.

Artist (Team) Introduction

Taiwanese artist Shu-Kai Lin and Wayne Ashley, Director and Executive Producer of FuturePerfect Studio in New York, bring together distinct artistic histories through an ongoing international collaboration. Rooted in the visual and spatial culture of Tainan, Lin works across painting, sculpture, and installation. Drawing upon architectural fragments, religious imagery, everyday materials, and forms originating in his family's factory, he constructs imagined cities that reflect his sustained engagement with urban life and transformation. Ashley's interdisciplinary practice spans artistic direction, curating, producing, live performance, and immersive media. Over several decades, he has developed collaborative frameworks bringing artists into dialogue with scientists, engineers, technologists, and performers, including work with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies. Through FuturePerfect Studio, he continues to investigate relationships between contemporary artistic practice and emerging technologies.

Their collaboration brings Lin's materially grounded visual practice into dialogue with Ashley's history of interdisciplinary experimentation. Together they are developing City Of Apparition, a modular immersive installation that extends these different artistic trajectories into a shared practice.

Wayne Ashley is a New York–based producer and director, and the Founder and Executive Producer of FuturePerfect Studio, an interdisciplinary practice working across immersive media, XR, and spatial installation. As a producer, he develops and leads complex international projects that integrate artistic direction, real-time technologies, and physical systems. His work spans collaborations with artists, cultural institutions, and technical teams across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Ashley’s producing practice focuses on the development of new forms of spatial experience, combining 3D environments, performance, and interactive systems. His recent projects include City Of Apparition, a multi-chapter mixed reality installation, and Void Climber, an independently developed video game. He has previously held leadership roles at major cultural institutions including BAM and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he produced large-scale interdisciplinary projects and developed initiatives at the intersection of performance, media, and technology. His work often involves building production pipelines that bridge artistic practice and emerging technologies.

Shu-Kai Lin graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, from which he also earned a master’s degree. He currently lives in Tainan. Graphic art and spatial installation are the staple forms of Lin’s oeuvre. Tainan, the place in which Lin came of age, is an ancient capital bristling with temples, serpentine lanes, and religious totems. The artist internalized these visual elements and spatial experiences, dismantling and reassembling the constituents of his personal life and epiphanies, thereby excavating the symbols buried deep within his subconscious. These symbols in an elaborate style gradually formed fantastic buildings that embody the cities and islands in his imagination, which resulted in his sui generis art series the Balcony City Civilization. Apart from creating images with religious implications, the artist seeks to turn the wooden molds left in his father’s factory into models of futuristic city, so as to reveal the myriad metamorphoses of cities and islands. He has been invited to international and domestic large-scale exhibitions at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Asian Culture Center (South Korea) and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Japan). He has also worked as an artist-in-residence and