City Of Apparition
Chapter 1: The Rupture

Friday, August 28th, 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.

Artists

Shu-Kai Lin and Wayne Ashley have been in an ongoing artistic dialogue between Taiwan and New York for the past three years, bringing together distinct artistic histories and approaches. Their collaboration brings Lin’s materially grounded visual practice into dialogue with Ashley’s interdisciplinary work across performance, installation, and immersive media.

Wayne Ashley is a New York State based executive producer, curator, and director whose work spans live performance, installation, immersive media, and interactive forms. Over several decades, Ashley has developed and produced projects in the United States and internationally. He previously held leadership roles at the Brooklyn Academy of Musicand the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he produced large-scale projects and developed new platforms for contemporary artists. At BAM, his work included collaborations with Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies, bringing artists into dialogue with scientific research and technological experimentation. Through FuturePerfect Studio, Ashley develops international collaborations and independently produced work. Selected projects include the video game Void Climber, Starve the Algorithm with William Kentridge, Studio Visit with sculptor Will Ryman, and AquaSonic with Between Music, an underwater music concert.

Shu-Kai Lin is a Taiwanese artist based in Tainan. He graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts, where he also received his master’s degree. His practice is deeply informed by the visual culture of Tainan—its temples, serpentine lanes, religious imagery, architectural forms, and continually changing urban fabric. Through processes of dismantling and reassembly, Lin transforms these elements into fantastic buildings, cities, and islands, most notably in his ongoing Balcony City Civilization series. He also works with wooden molds inherited from his family’s factory, transforming objects associated with manufacturing and labor into the architectural vocabulary of imagined cities. Across his practice, the city becomes a changing structure through which memory, history, material culture, and transformation are explored. Lin’s work has been presented internationally, including at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Asia Culture Center in South Korea, and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan.

Production Credits

Shu-Kai Lin
Lead Artist, Narrative

Wayne Ashley
Director, Executive Producer

FuturePerfect Studio
Executive Producer

Agile Lens
Mixed Reality Development

Scott Sheperd
English Voiceover

Shu-Kai Lin
Mandarin Voiceover

Theodore Schafer
Sound