Nowadays, the management of life and the body — from our quotidian activities and tasks to health, reproduction, and the biological dynamics of populations — has become the focus of power, governments, institutions, and other systems of control. This stands in dichotomous opposition to ‘posthumanism’, a socio-cultural movement and philosophical–critical current that challenges traditional, human-centred ways of thinking about identity and knowledge. Yaxuan Liao’s Self as Data (2024), aligned with posthumanism, views humans as inseparable from machines and algorithms.
Humans are only one node in a web of material and immaterial beings; thus, the human self is not fixed but permeable, fluid, and affected by other living organisms as well as tangible and intangible systems and technologies. The work presents humanity as quintessentially relational — whether this relation is with another human entity or with an iPhone app. It observes how we technologise our bodies, their functions, and our subjectivities, and therefore how we imperceptibly challenge the notion of a purely humanist subject in our everyday lives.
As part of the exhibition Nostalgia and Selfhood Becoming (6th–11th October 2025, Fitzrovia Gallery, London), Self as Data leads visitors to ask themselves: what counts as being, thinking, or feeling? Are we the only ones who can produce and impart knowledge? Yet it also puts forward its own provocative question: how can we — through art that functions as a ritual of transontological encounter, negotiation, and compromise — interpret existence as perspectival, plural, and unstable?
These questions are part of a controversial and extremely current debate, and Liao’s art transforms the latter into its visual manifestation. On the one hand, neither human nor AI modes of being, thinking, or “feeling” escape capture by systems of power, and both modalities are subject to the current critiques of “cognitive capitalism” and “feudo-capitalism” — structures that determine not only who, ultimately, decides what we know and do, but also what we can know and do without being under a centralised matrix of control.
On the other hand, and in spite of these new capitalistic configurations, there are still thoughts (and emotions) that humans shape as a form of resistance to power and capital. Only by developing awareness of our entanglement with biopolitics and technological systems can we cultivate a 21st-century autonomous self — one that, expressed through art, emerges from the interplay of humans, machines, and systems, and resists the monopolised forces of power and capital.
Whilst critiquing autonomy and centralised control over knowledge, Self as Data asserts that art challenges the limits imposed by today’s prevailing economic and political systems. Liao proposes a new iteration of artistic production which emerges through relationality, via the negotiation of subjectivity and personal experience with technology, social structures, and the increasingly overbearing domains of economy and commerce. Reflecting posthumanist and anti-capitalist sensibilities, Liao shows that art and the individual are aware of their mastery, as much as of the fact that they are embedded in, yet resisting, systemic domination.
Written by Kalinca Costa Sõderlund (PhD), Art Historian and Critic
