Art’s new hybrid economy

Who is making creative waves in a sector where analogue and digital media exist together?
Alex Estorick, The Art Newspaper, July 4, 2025

Palmer Gallery, in London, attempted something similar through its recent show Handful of Dust which considered sand as a mnemonic material and shapeshifting archive, slowing the spectator’s journey by situating them in a space of primordial experience. In this context, Li Li Ren stood out for her use of 3D-modelling software to develop a series of sculptures — from dismembered arms to desiccated topographies — that expressed the distribution of the body across physical and digital, and human and nonhuman domains.

 

At a moment when art’s legacy structures are giving way to a new border economy, work like Ren’s can help to ensure that AI and generative media do not create a state of unresolvable impasse but instead engineer a place where analogue and digital media live together in a rich field of hybrid creativity.