Tao Ya-Lun, a Taiwanese new-media artist and professor at National Chengchi University, has his solo exhibition Ubiquitous Ghosts on view at IA&A at Hillyer in Washington, D.C. through August 2 — two immersive VR installations and a video work that treat “ghosts” not as folklore but as the political, ideological, and economic forces that shape contemporary life while remaining structurally invisible.
Spectral, but not supernatural
Tao’s own framing is specific: the works examine spectral forces — political ideology, consumer fantasy, warfare, displacement — that influence how people live without ever fully showing themselves. That’s a deliberate redefinition of “ghost” as a way to talk about the parts of technological and political systems that operate through absence rather than presence: a surveillance apparatus you can’t see, an ideology that shapes decisions without announcing itself, a displacement that empties a place out rather than filling it with anything visible. Putting that argument inside a VR headset is the interesting move — it forces a viewer to spend physical time inside a space built to make the invisible legible, rather than reading about it.
Tao has been working at this intersection for decades. Born in Taipei in 1966, he’s built a body of work spanning video, sound, kinetic installation, and light before moving into AR and VR as his primary time-based media, consistently returning to how people use technology as “a means of physical extension” and how that extension reshapes bodily perception and consciousness. His earlier accolades include the New Media Art Installation Award at MADATAC in Madrid, the Taipei Arts Award, and residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art — a career built specifically around asking what a body is once technology has become one of its organs.
A show built for conversation, not just viewing
The exhibition’s run included a public artist talk on July 11, with Tao joined by curator Mia Yinxing Liu to walk through the VR components and how the show fits his larger practice, and a follow-up panel, “Generative AI: A Discussion about Art and Technology,” on July 18 — moderated by tech journalist Nihal J. Krishan, with immersive-media researcher Roger D. Eastman, ARTECHOUSE co-founder Sandro Kereselidze, and interdisciplinary artist Mollye Bendell. Pairing a VR-installation show with a panel specifically about generative AI signals how Hillyer is positioning the exhibition: not as a standalone artwork to walk through quietly, but as an entry point into a broader argument about what’s actually deciding things now that AI systems sit inside so much infrastructure.
With one visitor per VR piece at a time (a format Tao has used in prior stagings of related work), the show is built around individual, unhurried encounters rather than crowd flow — a deliberate slowness that matches the argument that these forces take sustained attention to even notice.
Ubiquitous Ghosts closes August 2 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW, Washington, D.C.