When planning the exhibition Neo-Space: Meet the new generation of independent artists , I had a long-term plan in my mind. I wanted to incorporate the word LOVE into each annual exhibition of the London Art Collective, which led to the thematic words for the first four years of the exhibition. From Launch, Openness, Versus and Exchange, until ArtEvol 2025: Voices from the Undefined , I once again rearranged these four letters, which generates another meaning of ‘EVOL’, namely, ‘Evolution’. Therefore, in the process of constructing this exhibition, I kept returning to the framework proposed by cybernetics. Compared to viewing it as a technology, I am more concerned with how it provides new paths of understanding for marginalised and insufficiently heard voices. The reason for choosing this theme is that in the highly systematised, labelled, and algorithmic cultural context of today, there are still many practices that cannot be fully integrated by language, institutions, or markets. They occur on the periphery, develop within unstable contexts, and respond in their own ways to social pressures, global mobility, technological intervention, and ongoing changes in identity. These practices remind us that art is not only an outcome but also a process; becoming itself is a positive aesthetic and political posture. When mainstream narratives organise knowledge in a centralised manner, cybernetics reminds us to focus on signals that are excluded from the system or weakened in the loop, which are not noise but key variables for the system to reorganise itself. These edge signals affect the overall structure through small perturbations, and their existence reveals how cognitive, subjective, and cultural networks are rewritten in constant feedback. In this understanding, each work in this exhibition is not a one-way expression, but rather like a series of ‘signal points’: they send neglected emotions, experiences, and history back into the loop, gaining position and energy in a constantly generated network of relationships. Artists’ cross-media, identity, and regional practices together form a dynamic system, and what I am doing is simply providing a field for these signals to resonate with each other. The participating artists in this exhibition come from diverse cultural backgrounds, and their practices span images, installations, sound, texts, and mixed media. Their commonality lies not in form but in a continuous exploratory attitude: how to find the relationship between oneself and the environment in an unstable world; how to generate new narratives through art; how to resist being defined. Their works either focus on contemplating the structure of memory, identity, and flow, or making marginalised experiences visible again. These themes of creation and exhibition form a kind of intertextuality and also constitute different aspects of our future possibilities. In terms of curatorial methods, I attempt to construct exhibition narratives in a cybernetic manner: not linear narratives, but multi-point open systems. The works form a mutual interaction rather than being incorporated into a single framework. The audience’s experience in the exhibition also has directional diversity, as they can enter from anywhere, move between works along their own path, and understand how artists handle feedback relationships in complex worlds through visual, physical, and emotional experiences. So in terms of spatial narrative, I am not following the presentation structure commonly seen in mainstream exhibitions. This layout allows works to connect with each other in a more natural and open way, and also turns the viewer’s movement in space into an active thinking process. The exhibition structure is therefore presented as a constantly expanding field rather than
NELSON QIN CURATOR’S FOREWORD
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