Testing Ground in Hong Kong and the Evolving Language of Digital Art

At Art Basel Zero 10 Hong Kong, TAEX presents Testing Ground, a new series of moving and still works by pioneering digital artist Kevin Abosch. Rather than depicting landscape as a fixed image, the works unfold as mutable environments—spaces where memory, material, and computational processes converge and continuously reshape one another. What emerges is less a representation of place than a living system, where perception itself becomes part of the terrain.

As a London-based platform cultivating a new generation of digital art collectors, TAEX has positioned itself at the forefront of a shifting cultural landscape, bridging artists, institutions, and evolving technologies. Ahead of the presentation, Whitewall spoke with Kevin Abosch and curator Stefanie De Regel—who has collaborated on shaping TAEX’s curatorial vision at the intersection of art and technology—about experimentation, authorship, and the expanding language of digital art.

Stefanie De Regel on the Digital Art Ecosystem

WHITEWALL: Hong Kong has long been a gateway between East and West. Do you sense that Asian collectors approach digital and AI-based art differently philosophically or commercially?

STEFANIE DE REGEL: From my perspective Hong Kong and the broader Asian region have played a particularly important role in legitimising digital and AI-based art within the art ecosystem. Before diving into the collector’s approach, I would like to sketch the digital art environment in Hong Kong. 

First, there has been a strong institutional and platform-level engagement with digital art. At the ecosystem level, Hong Kong developed dedicated events and fairs around digital art very early on. One example is Digital Art Fair Asia (2021-2024), which brought together immersive installations, web3 art projects, and galleries focused on new media. And even established art fairs, like Art Basel, have an increased presence of media art in Hong Kong, compared to their European and US counterparts.

Beyond fairs, there has been a significant museum and institutional engagement with digital art. The museum M+ in Hong Kong, which opened in 2021, has an interdisciplinary collection that already includes electronic media, moving image works, and digital commissions as part of its core collecting strategy.  

Even before opening, M+ commissioned digital-born works and web-based installations, demonstrating that digital practices were considered integral to contemporary visual culture rather than a peripheral category.  

The private sector has also played an unusually strong role in the region. The K11 ecosystem and the K11 Art Foundation, has supported artists, talks, exhibitions, and public programs around emerging technologies and digital culture. K11 also acquired several digital art works into the foundation’s collection.

What is particularly interesting is how these initiatives intersect with collecting culture. Many collectors in Asia come from technology, web3, finance, or entrepreneurial backgrounds. They tend to approach digital art with less hesitation than more traditional Western collectors. Often the art is collected by tech companies that have an art collection and notable figures in tech and web3. These collectors were most active also when auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s were strongly developing their digital marketplaces and held NFT auctions. These have now been mainly closed down or are inactive, or have been merged since with the contemporary auction.  

We also see that some families that previously collected contemporary painting or sculpture have become enthusiastic patrons of digital art. Portability, exchangeability and the ease of exhibiting are appealing to collectors, inconvenienced by storing numerous crates of fragile pieces.

So philosophically and commercially, Asian collectors often approach digital art slightly differently. They tend to see it not only as an extension of art history, but also as part of a broader technological culture—linked to innovation, data, gaming, and digital ownership.

“Portability, exchangeability and the ease of exhibiting are appealing to collectors.

-Stefanie De Regel.

AI’s Institutional Shift and the Future of Digital Art

WW: With Kevin Abosch’s Testing Ground premiering here, how do you frame this collaboration within the broader institutional recognition of AI-based practices? Is this still a frontier moment, or are we entering consolidation? 

SDR: At the moment we’re between frontier and consolidation. 

For two decades, AI in art was largely treated as an experimental frontier — artists exploring new tools, often shown in tech-adjacent contexts, digital festivals, or new-media sections of fairs. But in the past two-three years, there has been a clear shift toward institutional recognition. 

Several major institutions have explored AI or generative art:
• Serpentine Galleries — programs like the Creative AI Lab and exhibitions examining machine learning and art.
• Barbican Centre — exhibitions and talks on AI and creativity within their art-technology programming.
• Museum of Modern Art — acquisitions and exhibitions connected to algorithmic and generative practices.

Artists like Kevin Abosch are particularly important at this moment because their work doesn’t just use AI as a tool—it questions authorship, identity, and the politics of machine systems.

So with Testing Ground, the framing is less about “AI art” as a novelty and more about how artists interrogate algorithmic systems that increasingly shape society. In that sense, the work participates in a broader institutional shift: AI is moving from technological experiment → conceptual medium.

WW: Digital art experienced an intense speculative peak a few years ago. What do you believe is the current state of the market correction, maturation, or reinvention?

SDR: Digital art exists for more than half a century – from early algorithmic art to computer art and net art to then AI and generative art. It has been receiving institutional recognition in the 1990s and 2000s (ex. Guggenheim acquisitions of Shu Lea Cheang and Jenny Holzer) yet it experienced an intense speculative peak during the NFT boom, and since then the market has gone through a significant correction. In many ways, I think this has been a healthy development. The boom gave digital art an unprecedented level of global visibility and helped establish it as a legitimate contemporary medium reflecting the technologies shaping our time.

At the same time, the rapid expansion created a market with very little curatorial structure, and the ease of minting meant the space became flooded with content. When the cryptocurrency market corrected, the NFT market inevitably followed. What we are seeing now is a more mature phase where attention is shifting back toward artists with strong conceptual practices and a deeper understanding of digital culture. At TAEX we also put the accent on the curatorial aspect. We adopted a framework that stems from the traditional gallery system and applied it to the digital art world. 

One aspect that I find particularly encouraging is the collaborative spirit within the digital art ecosystem. Compared to the traditional art market, digital galleries and platforms tend to be very open to dialogue and collaboration. Many of the people building these spaces come from technology backgrounds or share a strong curiosity about emerging technologies, which creates a slightly different—and quite refreshing—approach to how the ecosystem evolves.

Ultimately, what we’re witnessing is not the end of digital art, but its transition from a speculative area into a more thoughtful and sustainable cultural field.

WW: TAEX emphasizes curation and discourse through Digital Dialogues and institutional partnerships. Do you see the future of digital art being shaped more by technology companies or by curatorial rigor?

SDR: I think that the future lies in the collaboration of the two, led by curatorial (and institutional initiatives). Digital art has emerged from the desire to break into the virtual discourse space using the most advanced, sometimes barely emerging tools. In this sense, technological companies and their products are an invaluable source of inspiration, both technological and conceptual, since we see more and more artists exploring the ethics of technology, such as Kevin Abosch. It is also important to mention that many technological companies have their own art collections which contribute to the artistic diversity in the field (such as Google, LG, Microsoft, and web3 and gaming companies such as Sandbox). This being said, beyond creation and discourse, there is communication. Here, professional curators are very much needed to break the remaining ice of institutional scepticism towards emerging art forms and contextualise them. Also, we will hopefully see more dedicated applied arts faculties in leading universities and art academies, for example in Central Saint Martins and the RA. Surveys, academic papers, panel talks (like Digital Dialogues) led by experienced curators are a vital part of digital art evolution. For now the pool of public art advocates among contemporary art curators and historians is not that big.

To sum up, the combination of curatorial and institutional visibility, support from technological companies, and educational breakthroughs are what is needed to shape the future of digital art.

Kevin Abosch on Artistic Responsibility

WW: Your work integrates generative systems and computational processes. At what point does the machine stop being a tool and become a collaborator?

KEVIN ABOSCH: I actually resist the word “collaborator,” because it smuggles in a kind of emotional equality that isn’t really accurate. The machine doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t suffer, it doesn’t risk reputation, it doesn’t have stakes. So I try to be precise — it’s not a partner. It’s an instrument that has become unpredictable at scale.

That said, there is a threshold where it stops behaving like a traditional tool. A brush doesn’t surprise you with an entire universe. A camera doesn’t propose ten thousand variations of a gesture in a minute. With generative systems, the “tool” starts to act more like an environment, something you enter and steer, rather than something you simply operate.

For me, that shift happens when the system produces outputs that I couldn’t have directly imagined, but that still feel uncannily aligned with the questions I’m asking. Not because the machine understands me, but because I’ve built a set of constraints where interesting accidents become likely. At that point the practice becomes less about execution and more about governance: setting rules, shaping the distribution of possibilities, deciding what kinds of emergence are allowed.

So if we need a word for it, I’d say the machine becomes a co-authoring condition, a generator of difference—while I remain the author of the frame: the intent, the selection, the sequencing, the ethics, the final responsibility. The “voice” isn’t in the model. The voice is in what I decide is worth keeping, and what I refuse to normalize.

“The voice is in what I decide is worth keeping, and what I refuse to normalize.”

-Kevin Abosch.

WW: In a moment where AI tools are widely accessible, how does authorship retain meaning?

KA: Authorship still matters, but it’s no longer a question of who clicked the button. It’s a question of who designed the conditions under which the image, the sequence, the tone, and the ethics become inevitable.

AI tools being accessible doesn’t diminish authorship. It just removes the old alibi of craft as proof of value. When the means are cheap, intention becomes expensive. What I’m responsible for is not the software; it’s the system I build around it: the constraints, the training logic, the selection pressure, the edits I refuse to make, the edits I insist on making, and the context I place the work inside. The work is authored at the level of decisions. This includes what I choose to amplify, what I choose to suppress, and what I decide to let remain unresolved.

For me, authorship is also accountability. AI produces abundance; authorship is the act of saying, this is the signal, this is the cut, this is the risk I’m willing to stand behind. If anything, the flood of images makes the author’s role sharper: not as a maker of objects, but as a composer of attention and consequence.

And there’s a deeper thing — the tools are accessible, but the practice isn’t. A practice is time— years of building taste, developing a nervous system for images, learning what seduces you, what disgusts you, what you tend to mythologize, and how to sabotage your own habits. The tool can imitate surface style; it can’t automatically generate an ethic, a refusal, or a worldview. Authorship retains meaning when it’s understood as a coherent position maintained over time.

So yes, anyone can generate. But not everyone can author. Authorship is the consistency of a mind at work across iterations, across mediums, across failures, and choosing what kind of reality to propose, and accepting responsibility for the proposal.

WW: What distinguishes artistic AI practice from technological production?

KA: Technological production is optimized for utility. It wants clean outcomes and measurable wins. Artistic AI practice, at least the kind I care about, is optimized for friction. It uses the same machinery, but it points it at questions the machinery would rather avoid.

So the distinction isn’t “AI vs not-AI,” or even “art vs tech.” It’s the intention and the evaluation criteria. In tech, you ship a solution. In art, you stage a problem. In tech, failure is a bug. In art, failure can be the content, because it reveals the boundary conditions of the system, what it excludes, what it hallucinates, what it normalizes.

Another difference is responsibility. Technological production often hides its politics behind efficiency. You know — it’s just a tool, it’s neutral, it’s progress. Artistic practice makes the politics visible, sometimes by exaggerating them, sometimes by withholding comfort. It asks, who benefits from this model of seeing? What type of labor is compressed into the interface? What gets erased when we call something “synthetic,” or “smart,” or “automatic”?

And finally, there’s time. Tech is designed to disappear into everyday life. Art insists on presence. It slows you down long enough to feel the system and its seductions, its violence, its beauty, its indifference. That’s the real split for me. Technological production wants to be seamless. Artistic AI practice makes the seams the subject.

The Future of the Medium 

WW: Landscape, environment, and synthetic ecologies recur in your work. Do you see digital art as uniquely positioned to address climate, memory, and simulation in ways traditional media cannot?

KA: Digital art isn’t “better” than traditional media, but it’s operating inside the same substrate that’s reshaping how reality is perceived, stored, and governed. That gives it a particular leverage, especially around climate, memory, and simulation, because those aren’t just themes anymore. They’re veritable infrastructures.

Climate is increasingly mediated through satellites, models, dashboards, insurance maps, prediction systems, images and data, that decide what is considered as risk and what gets ignored. Digital work can speak in that native language, not by illustrating climate, but by interrogating the aesthetics and politics of measurement. For example, what becomes visible, what stays off-screen, what gets turned into an interface.

Memory too has changed. We don’t just remember; we outsource remembering to platforms. We live in a world where archives are searchable, editable, and quietly lossy, where what “exists” is also what can be retrieved. Digital art can treat memory as something procedural — versioned, recomposed, corrupted, re-rendered. It can show how the past is constantly being simulated in the present, not held intact.

And then simulation: we’re surrounded by synthetic environments that aren’t simply images. They’re decision-spaces — Training sets, virtual worlds, generative landscapes, predictive models. My interest in synthetic ecologies is partly about that: the way we’re building second natures, and then acting as if they were neutral. Digital art can model that condition from the inside. It can build worlds that behave like systems, where causality is fuzzy, where the “natural” is already coded, where beauty and violence can share the same rendering pipeline.

So yes, there are things digital art can do that painting or sculpture can’t. It can operate at the level of process, it can make time and mutability part of the material, it can treat representation as an evolving system rather than a fixed image.

But the deeper point is simpler in that digital art is uniquely positioned because it isn’t just depicting our era, but it’s made of the same forces that are producing it. It can show how climate becomes image, how memory becomes database, and how simulation becomes a form of governance. And it can do that without pretending there’s a clean outside.

WW: Many collectors still struggle with the idea of immateriality. How do you speak about permanence, scarcity, and value in digital work today? Has blockchain meaningfully resolved those tensions?

KA: Immateriality is a strange word, because digital work is not immaterial—it’s just differently material. It lives in storage, networks, electricity, maintenance, display hardware, and institutional protocols. The “object” is distributed, but it’s still an object in the sense that it has a life cycle and dependencies. So when collectors ask about permanence, I try to shift the conversation away from fantasy permanence. You know, the idea that a painting is eternal – and toward managed permanence: conservation as an active relationship.

Permanence in digital is closer to film or performance than to bronze. It’s preservation through care like migration plans, master files, checksums, documentation, display specs, and clear instructions for what is allowed to change and what must remain invariant. The work survives because someone assumes the honor or the burden.

Scarcity is similar. Digital abundance is real, but scarcity in art has never been purely technical. It’s social, contractual, and cultural. Editions, provenance, and institutional validation create scarcity in painting too — it’s just disguised as material uniqueness. In digital, we have to be more honest: scarcity is authored. It’s an agreement about how the work circulates, and how it’s shown, and what constitutes “the work” versus a copy, a still, a fragment, a screen recording.

Value, for me, comes from coherence and consequence — a body of work that holds a position over time, that takes risk, that changes how people see. If you reduce value to file format and ownership mechanism, you miss the point. The market can trade certificates, but what it’s really collecting, when it’s serious, is a sustained intelligence.

Has blockchain resolved it? It’s resolved one part: it made provenance and transfer legible in a natively-digital way, and it gave collectors the familiar ritual of ownership. But it didn’t solve permanence! Chains don’t preserve files, and hardware dies, formats change, platforms vanish. And it didn’t solve value, because value isn’t a ledger entry — it’s context, discourse, exhibition history, and the work’s ability to endure attention.

So I see the blockchain as an administrative layer. Sure, sometimes it’s useful, and sometimes it’s distracting. The real resolution is a mature ecology of conservation standards, thoughtful editioning, good contracts, and institutions treating digital work as something worth maintaining, not a novelty that should magically persist on its own.

WW: Looking ahead five years, do you think we will still speak about “digital art” as a separate category or will it simply become contemporary art?

KA: I think the category “digital art” will fade, and not because the digital disappears, but because it becomes ambient. When a medium becomes infrastructure, it stops reading as a genre.

We’re already close to that. Most contemporary art is produced, circulated, documented, and metabolized through computational systems. Even painting lives a second life as images, feeds, archives, and compression artifacts. So the question won’t be “is it digital?” — It’ll be “what is the work doing inside the conditions of computation?”But I don’t think the label vanishes cleanly. It will persist the way “photography” persists — sometimes as a medium-specific discourse, sometimes as a market category, sometimes as a curatorial shorthand. The more interesting shift is that we’ll stop treating digital as synonymous with “new,” and start treating it as a set of political and aesthetic problems: simulation, automation, opacity, synthetic memory, platform power, data extraction.

So yes, it becomes simply contemporary art, because contemporary life is already computational. And the artists who matter won’t be defined by tools, but by the clarity of their position and how they shape attention, how they stage responsibility, and how they refuse the default settings of the time.