Synthetic Mobility

Artist: Ai Makita | Sizhu Li

September 19– November 8, 2026

Opening: September 19, 2026, 5–8 pm

View fullsize

Ai Makita, Variant Ⅳ (detail), 2026. Oil on polyester, 63 x 63 inches

Selected Works

View fullsize

Ai Makita, Crowd, 2026. Oil on polyester, 15 x 20 inches

Sizhu Li, Moonment, 2024. Aluminum sheet, motor, lifting system, wood, still rope.

Inquire for Works

(New York – August 2026) Fou Gallery is pleased to present Synthetic Mobility, a two-person exhibition featuring Tokyo- and New York-based artist Ai Makita and China-born, Houston-based kinetic artist Sizhu Li, on view from September 19 through November 8, 2026. The exhibition brings to the fore important questions about the interaction between technology and humans, considering how larger societal shifts affect the way artists represent humanity and reconstituted spaces.

(New York – August 2026) Fou Gallery is pleased to present Synthetic Mobility, a two-person exhibition featuring Tokyo- and New York-based artist Ai Makita and China-born, Houston-based kinetic artist Sizhu Li, on view from September 19 through November 8, 2026. The exhibition brings to the fore important questions about the interaction between technology and humans, considering how larger societal shifts affect the way artists represent humanity and reconstituted spaces.

The concept of the exhibition is connected to Timothy Morton’s idea of hyperobjects, according to which we cannot fully perceive larger structures surrounding us and widely distributed across space and time, but can try to describe their attributes and make a reasonable guess about their true nature. Synthetic mobility - the artificial generation of realistic human movement patterns using advanced algorithms - is a phenomenon related to the new acceleration of living rhythms promoted by digital progress. As the world is enveloped in ideological and cultural conflicts, Makita and Li consider what it means to remain individuals today, and how changes in technology alter our sense of perception and our mode of existence.

Ai Makita presents oil paintings, several of them developed in conjunction with the AI model Midjourney and others based on images created in Photoshop by folding aluminum sheets. The depicted forms represent abstract conjunctions of pipes, conduits, and industrial infrastructure. Folded materials result in labyrinths of fluidity and line resembling a circulatory or nervous system, an organism’s internal anatomy, or an invisible technological network now made visible. The created conduits recall flowing rivers, transcended thresholds, and the linearity of time. Close conceptual connection with Minimalism makes Makita’s stretched lines internally connected to Donald Judd looking at the properties and the rigidity of the structures as well as relation of this (in)stability to the current historical moment. Process art likewise plays a significant role in Makita’s practice, albeit in a form more appropriate to its new, updated version, where the digital has taken the place of the physical. Her paintings leave the viewer with a sense of wonder about where these meandering curves are leading and whether there is any specific destination. Mystery emerges not through mystical effects, but through the inability to grasp the full picture, pushing us to step away while also looking closer.

Sizhu Li presents sculptures made primarily from aluminum sheets and industrial fans. In Pushing Hands (2024–present), opposing forces travel through an industrial metal wave, creating a rhythm of tension and equilibrium that references the Taoist principle of balance. The title directly refers to the fundamental Tai Chi practice of Tui Shou, or “pushing hands,” centered on sensing, yielding to, and balancing opposing forces. Evolving from her earlier project Moonment, Li uses programmed fans and suspended aluminum sheets to construct a live, percussive environment of moving metallic waves. In Yuanbao (2026), she brings the traditional Chinese symbol of wealth and blessing into conversation with the ephemeral form of clouds, moving between material and spiritual aspirations, permanence and transience. Meanwhile, Oops, Caught’ya! (2026) turns the clamp into both a generative and restraining device, using movement, suspension, and pressure to consider freedom, constraint, instability, and balance.

Together, the two artists create a dialogue in which materials work as experimental tools to devise new understandings of where we are as a human species. Both artists look at motion, structure, and encounter as facilitated by materials, planes, and color. Makita’s paintings examine the transformations and limits caused by new synthetic mobility, while Li’s sculptures engage the same idea through three-dimensional objects. Neither artist provides specific arguments or answers; instead, they offer aesthetic tools that can help broaden our understanding of the technological forces increasingly shaping contemporary life.

*The press release is based on the essay by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani, edited by Iris Zhang.

Read All

---

News and Reviews

Upcoming

Catalogue

Upcoming

---

Relevant Events

Upcoming

---

Artists

Ai Makita (b.1985, Chiba, Japan) graduated from the Oil painting program of the Tsukuba University, Ibaraki (B.F.A.) in 2008, the Oil Painting Department of Tokyo Gakugei University (M.F.A.) in 2010, and Art and Education Program at Tokyo University of Arts (M.F.A.) in 2013.  Currently, she is living and working in New York and Tokyo. Her work has been presented extensively across Japan, Europe, Asia, and the United States, including Baert Gallery, Los Angeles (2025); Tokyo 8min, Tokyo (2025); Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Taiwan (2025); PARCEL, Tokyo (2024); Chilli Art Projects, London (2024); The Something Machine, New York (2024/2022); Mitsukoshi Contemporary, Tokyo (2022); mhPROJECTnyc, New York (2021). She has participated in residency programs at Vermont Studio Center, Vermont (2025), The Fores Project, London (2023), ART CAKE, New York (2020), SS Vallejo Varda Artist Residency, Sausalito (2018–2019), and Residency Unlimited, New York (2017). In 2026, Makita was named a finalist for the 18th Prisma Art Prize in Rome, Italy. She was awarded a Fellowship Grant from the Pola Art Foundation in 2017, the Prize at the 18th Taro Okamoto Award and the Artistic Cultural Award in Chiba City in 2015, and the Prize at the 1st Terrada Art Award in 2014. Her work is included in the following public and corporate collections: the Museum of Tokyo National University of the Arts, Chiba Bank, and the Takahashi Collection.

Sizhu Li (b.1990, Sichuan, China) holds a BFA from Central Academy of Fine Arts (2016) and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (2018) with the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. Currently, she is living and working in Houston, Texas. Sizhu's works have been widely exhibited in Europe and America.  Since 2020, her work has been well shown internationally, including Contemporary at Blue Star, San Antonio (2025); Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark (2024); Morris Museum, New Jersey (2022); Alabama Contemporary Art Center (2022); Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Georgia (2021); Flux Factory Gallery, New York (2020). . She has participated in residency programs at A4 Museum, Chengdu (2024); Marble House Residency, Vermont (2022); 4heads Artists in Residency, New York (2020); Anderson Ranch Residency, Snowmass (2019). In 2025, she received the Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She was awarded the Small Artist Grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Creative Learning Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2023, the New York City Corps Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2022.

---

Essay Writer

Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani (she/her)  is a Georgian-born and New York-based independent curator, writer, and researcher. She holds undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Gender Studies from Tbilisi State University and Mount Holyoke College, and a graduate degree in Museum Studies from the City University of New York. Chkareuli-Mdivani's book, King is Female, published in October 2018 in Berlin by Wienand Verlag, explores the lives of three Georgian women artists and is the first publication to investigate questions of feminine identity in the context of the Eastern European historical, social, and cultural transformation of the last twenty years. Since 2017, Chkareuli-Mdivani has regularly contributed reviews, essays, and interviews to Artforum, Berlin Art Link, e-flux,  Flash Art Magazine, Hot Coffee Conversations, Hyperallergic, JANE Magazine Australia, Le Quotidien de l'Art, post.MoMA, NERO Editions Italy, Overstandard, Spaghetti Boost, The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail,  White Hot Magazine, and others. She has curated over ten exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles (U.S.), Iserlohn and Berlin (Germany), Daugavpils (Latvia), and Tbilisi (Georgia). Her research involves the intersection of art history, museum, and decolonization studies, focusing on totalitarian art and trauma theory; she has extensively written on the erasure of culture and recontextualization of Soviet and contemporary art within Eastern European and Western contexts.

---

Installation Images

Upcoming