“Ubiquitous Ghosts,” a solo exhibition by Taiwanese new-media artist Tao Ya-Lun, is on view at IA&A at Hillyer in Washington, DC, from July 11 through August 2 (the show has also appeared at MOCA Taipei). It gathers two immersive VR installations — “Wandering Ghost No.9” and “Wandering Ghost No.10” — alongside the video work “Blind Flow Project – Ukraine,” using virtual reality to make tangible the “spectral forces” the title invokes: political ideology, consumer fantasy, war, exile. A related program on July 18 convened artists and technologists to discuss AI, VR, and the shifting landscape of creativity.
VR as a medium for the invisible
Most VR art leans on the technology’s obvious strength — transporting you somewhere spectacular. Tao’s move is more conceptual: he uses immersion to make you feel the abstractions that actually govern modern life but have no physical form. Ideology, spectacle, the pull of consumer desire, the distant weight of war — these are the “ghosts,” and VR’s capacity to surround the body, to place you inside a space with no exit but the headset, becomes a way to render them as felt experience rather than argued point. That’s a meaningfully different use of the medium from escapism or spectacle, and it’s why Tao has been an important figure in Asian new-media art for decades.
The Ukraine video and the political turn
Pairing the “Wandering Ghost” VR works with “Blind Flow Project – Ukraine” grounds the show’s metaphysics in the concrete. The spectral forces Tao evokes aren’t only philosophical; they produce real displacement, real violence, real exile. Bringing a work explicitly about Ukraine into the exhibition insists that the “ghosts” of ideology and war have addresses and casualties — a reminder that immersive technology, so often deployed for entertainment, can be turned toward witness and reflection. It’s the kind of politically engaged new-media practice that resists the field’s tendency toward pure sensory dazzle.
Why it’s worth seeing
For the digital-artists thread this site follows, “Ubiquitous Ghosts” is a useful counterweight to the AI-and-spectacle stories that dominate the moment: an artist using immersive tools not to generate more content but to think, and to make viewers think, about the unseen systems shaping them. On view in DC only through August 2, it’s a chance to experience VR as a serious artistic instrument in the hands of someone who has spent a career refining what the medium can say. As with any VR show, the caveat is practical — it’s an in-person, headset-based experience that doesn’t translate to a screen — which is precisely the point.