Metamorphosis: Beyond the Real. Searching for Victoria Lu

“Metamorphosis: Beyond the Real. Searching for Victoria Lu – When Humans and AI Think Together, the Story Begins” is a major research exhibition presented at Ca’ Foscari Esposizioni, Venice, from 9 May to 22 November 2026. Conceived both as a retrospective and as an open curatorial inquiry, the exhibition retraces over fifty years of artistic, critical, and curatorial practice by Victoria Lu, while simultaneously questioning how human subjectivity, authorship, and cultural memory might be reinterpreted in the era of artificial intelligence. More than a retrospective, the exhibition positions Victoria Lu as both a historical protagonist and an unfinished contemporary subject: a figure through whom the past, present, and future of curatorial thinking can be reconsidered under the emerging conditions of AI.

Widely recognised as one of the first-generation Asian curators and as one of the earliest Chinese pioneers of contemporary curatorial practice, Victoria Lu occupies a foundational place in the history of Chinese-language contemporary art. The exhibition frames Victoria Lu not merely as an individual subject, but as a key witness and active agent in the formation, transformation, and globalisation of contemporary art in the Sinophone world. In this sense, “Searching for Victoria Lu – When Humans and AI Think Together, the Story Begins” is not only the story of a life; it is an inquiry into the cultural, institutional, and intellectual conditions that have shaped half a century of artistic transformation in Asia and beyond.