Connect to Your Inner Self with Chando Ao at Postmasters

Presenting his audience with a series of self-reflective objects, Ao invites onlookers to interact with creations that fall at an intersection of technology and the human experience. Crafted to confuse, inspire, disturb, and stimulate, the works allow the viewers’s “I” to gain a higher awareness when facing the specially crafted interactions—which include encounters with digital drawings, screen mirrors, animatronic animals, and other mechanical objects and vessels.

Pole Chairs (floor-to-ceiling metal pipes) beg viewers to climb atop their unconventional seats, taking part in a performative floating experience. Two robotic dogs (inspired by the gallery’s resident French bulldogs) react to visitors’s advances to demonstrate the functions of human’s best friends, programmed for companionship and service, respectively. The 3D-printed Vessels offer a moment of self-reflection as viewers contemplate how a living flower might thrive with a manmade sculpture, and the Mirror works replace the typical reflective surface with a screen that captures onlookers digitally.