Reimagining the Future: Art as Catalyst in Uncertain Times
In a world where algorithms predict our every move and headlines about technological acceleration, climate change, and geopolitics crowd our feeds, where do art and culture fit—and why do they matter now more than ever?
As Frieze Seoul 2025 closes, many are focused on sales figures and market trends, important metrics for the ecosystem’s survival. Yet what excites me most are the artists who are questioning our condition and challenging the status quo. This year’s Frieze Seoul Artist Prize, the Focus Asia solo presentations, and Lee Bul’s survey at the Leeum Museum all point to a deeper current: the fragility of humanity, and our shifting relationships with fiction, reality, and nature—issues that shape our common future.
The world’s current status is one of instability: economic headwinds, social divides, ecological precarity, and existential doubt. For many, the future feels both exhilarating yet taxing—full of possibility but shadowed by uncertainty. In this context, art’s value is not to provide answers but to frame urgent questions: How do we navigate boundaries, both real and imagined, public and private, national and personal? How do we restore our relationship with nature, and reckon with the ambitions and anxieties that technology generates? How can we create space for difference, dissent, and the unknown, rather than defaulting to efficiency and profit?
Image courtesy of kohesi initiatives and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno.
For many, the future feels both exhilarating yet taxing—full of possibility but shadowed by uncertainty. In this context, art’s value is not to provide answers but to frame urgent questions…
Critical Questioning and Collective Imagination
Art and creativity have always been vanguards for critical questioning and collective imagining. Today, as it always has been the case, at moments of uncertainty, artists are not merely commentators, but tinkerers, provocateurs, and visionaries, acting as lenses onto our vastly evolving socio-techno-political context, shedding light on issues that may otherwise lie dormant beneath the prodigality of contemporary life.
The 2025 Frieze Seoul Artist Prize, themed “Future Commons,” foregrounds these concerns. The winning proposal, Calming Signal, by Seoul-based artist Im Youngzoo, explores our shared perception of reality and the commonality between human and nonhumans at times of collective unease. The three-channel video installation draws its title from the repetitive behaviour observed in animals under stress, using these behaviours as a metaphor to reflect on human societies at a time of ever-changing digital environment, our collective behaviour and societal rhythms.
Solo presentations of emerging artists at Focus Asia, such as Mirim Chu’s work reflects upon our hyper-digitalised context of contemporary life and reimagines the visual and structural narratives of our data-centric environments. Taiki Yokote's kinetic sculptures blend artificial and organic, and questions the meaning of form, nature, and materiality. Fu Liang’s mineral painting explores notions of human fragility, the unknown, and the complex entanglement between self and environment. Timoteus Anggawan Kusno’s winning solo presentation at Kohesi Initiatives reflect on the power of creative imagination under the context of lost history, the reordering of cultural memory, and our living reality of today emerging with a constant tension.
Floating Rubble / Zen, Gure, Coco, Sen, Po, Ten, Kuki, Kurumi (when the cat’s away, the mice will play). Image courtesy of CON_ and Taiki Yokote
How do we restore our relationship with nature, and reckon with the ambitions and anxieties that technology generates?
IM Youngzoo, Calming Signal (이탤릭), 2023/2025, Three-channel video installation. Concept image. Image courtesy of the artist.
Artists, Innovation, and the Future We Make
In the words of Hegel, art is a form of cultural expression and “reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of humanity” and presents culture’s deepest values. Today, many of us are concerned of what the future holds. But the future is not delivered; it is constructed—through questioning, collaboration, and creative risk.
Around the world, artists and cultural practitioners are leading innovation. The British Council’s 2025 report compiles statements from artists, collectives, and institutions detailing how artistic imagination drives the human-centric development of technology. From Serpentine Arts Technologies’ new governance models for AI in collaboration with artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, to Rebecca Allen’s pioneering work in 3D motion capture, to Laure Prouvost’s multisensory explorations of quantum technology, artist-led projects are catalysing social and technological transformation. These efforts realign technology with ecology, community, and human values, offering solutions to planetary-scale challenges.
The future is not a given, and in uncertain times, art offers not certainty but invitation—to think, to feel, to act.The future is shaped by all who care to participate. As we step away from the spectacle of Seoul, let’s not only support artists and cultural practitioners, but join them in questioning, imagining, and building our shared world.
The future is not a given, and in uncertain times, art offers not certainty but invitation—to think, to feel, to act.
