The For You web page, as the favored TikTok remark goes, is getting too native. I, for one, am grateful. Umber Majeed’s exhibition J😊Y TECH attracts from the visible vernacular of telephone restore shops within the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens — their densely packed cacophony of shiny colours, screaming fonts, and plenty of languages spilling out into the sidewalks — as an extension of her ongoing Trans-Pakistan analysis challenge impressed by her uncle’s now-defunct vacationer company. She builds his real-life enterprise right into a digital universe by way of augmented actuality (AR), video, drawings, and ceramics that mine “South Asian digital kitsch,” because the introductory textual content places it. Although its execution is a bit uneven, this one-room exhibition is likely one of the most technically ingenious I’ve seen, and is a contemporary and thrilling excavation of the fertile bodily/digital intersection between diasporic Asian and early web aesthetics.
Technological nostalgia, notably across the Nineties and early 2000s, is a persistent visible theme all through the exhibition at the same time as its personal instruments are cutting-edge. One of many first works that viewers encounter is “Untitled” (2025), a one-minute single-channel video on a particular show that produces a convincing simulation of a three-dimensional field. Objects float mesmerizingly, as if in an aquarium or on a 3D screensaver. These embrace a hand-drawn red-and-white checkered Apple emblem that’s one thing like an emblem for the exhibition; relics of information storage like a CD-ROM and a floppy disk; and a Mughal dome that bops round like a jellyfish. The field itself works virtually like a meta information storage gadget — not one which shops uncooked bits of data comparable to matrices, arrays, or graphs, however one thing extra like a repository of collective reminiscence.
8-second gif of Umber Majeed, “Untitled” (2025), single-channel video on Wanting Glass 3D Spatial Show, 1 min. loop, silent
J😊Y TECH toys with and infrequently explodes the everyday type and limits of an exhibition. The daring neon-red frames of the AR works colour extra analog parts as effectively, together with a dynamic arrow that zig-zags from the ceiling onto the highest of the partial wall that divides the exhibition diagonally and down its aspect, ending on the ground pointing towards the large vinyl wall work “Timeline” (2024–25). A black and white, purple and white, or grey and white grid alternatively invoking the tiled flooring of a small enterprise and a clean digital house (comparable to in a brand new Photoshop doc) is a key motif of the exhibition — it seems on a number of partitions and is reproduced in smaller, extra playful type inside particular person works, comparable to a vortex sucking in an older-generation iPhone. The motif is meant to bend and fuse the planes of actual and digital house simply as she digitally builds on her uncle’s real-life journey company.
Left: Umber Majeed, “zoom in” (2024), combined media on paper and web-based augmented realityanimation; proper: Umber Majeed, “Saath Haath” (2024), combined media on paper and web-based augmented actuality animation
Nonetheless, it will possibly typically really feel just like the concepts on this exhibition can supersede their execution. Although she deliberately and successfully privileges these with the language and/or tradition she’s focusing on — those that learn Bangla and Urdu would acknowledge phrases in these languages within the aforementioned untitled animation, as an example — some works demand loads of viewers no matter their background. Whilst you would possibly acknowledge the Mughal dome that additionally floats across the similar work if you happen to’re acquainted with South Asian tradition or artwork historical past, you won’t comprehend it sat atop the Pakistan pavilion on the 1964–65 World Honest until you’re listening to the Bloomburg Connects audio description or studying its transcription. Different items are inaccessible in spatial methods: Sure drawings, comparable to “Goes Digital” (2021), are hung inhumanly excessive, and due to this fact tough to see.
An untitled video work close to the tip of the exhibition feels most tough to understand. It mimics the visual-sonic-informational overload of social media — there’s image-editing, advertisements, webpages, archival data, iPhone display screen recordings, and icons bouncing concerning the three channels, to not point out a set of real-life ceramic sculptures. It successfully satirizes the type of quick-cut brainrot endemic to Youtube essays and TikToks, however to what finish? I walked away with loads of attention-grabbing data buzzing round my head — jewellery designer Barbara Anton was commissioned to focus on the pure pink pearl farming business in what’s now Bangladesh as a part of the World Honest, and “String of Pearls” can also be a time period invented by america to confer with a community of Chinese language navy and industrial amenities, as an example — however not the structure to place it collectively.
Set up view of Umber Majeed, “WE CAN FIX IT” (2025), ceramic, decal, and wooden
Majeed’s work additionally spurred maybe the deepest and most substantive episode to this point in my ongoing struggles with my notion of “good” and “bad” aesthetics, and whether or not they come from an internalization of problematic hierarchies. I cherished “WE CAN FIX IT” (2025), a wonky signboard product of decals on ceramic and wooden that bears the title together with light pictures of defunct gadgets. It felt like a wiser, sharper, and extra politically agitative model of the work of Shanzhai Lyric. Slightly than merely arguing for the fantastic thing about pedestrian tradition, as Shanzhai Lyric does with misspelled English phrases in Chinese language clothes and Majeed does with diasporic South Asian-owned tech restore retailers, the work additionally factors towards the potential of those visible languages to unsettle dominant varieties. To me, they symbolize the trickle-up of hyperlocal relatively than the trickle-down of company tradition, the proof of life carved out from inhospitable terrain. However I additionally questioned if I responded to the work as a result of I might simply think about it in a white dice gallery.
I additionally questioned if somebody who was much less acquainted with the visible tradition of Queens and invested within the associated Chinese language/Chinese language diasporic aesthetic of Shanzhai might have a differing opinion of “WE CAN FIX IT.” And I thought-about whether or not a associated bias in background (comparable to my very own failed forays within the medium) would possibly form my emotions about her drawings. Some, such because the AR-activated “Saath Haath” (2024), depicting arms clasped collectively beneath a horizon line as darkish bands join them above, felt somewhat juvenile to me of their technical clumsiness, whether or not intentional or not. However they do make for an ideal distinction with the slickness of the exhibition’s digital innovation, in addition to mesh effectively with the stuttering visible tradition of an early web, which is endearing and nostalgic.
J😊Y TECH cuts notably deep for a technology of Asian Individuals who got here of age throughout the Nineties and 2000s, and noticed the aesthetics of their diasporic tradition meld, typically queasily, with that of early digital tradition. Majeed’s work could be the primary time I’ve actually encountered a significant exploration of that concept, which brings with it the luggage of all that cultural nervousness, in addition to pleasure. I can’t wait to see the place Majeed — and the remainder of the vanguard of this explicit area of interest the place first-gen diaspora meets early-gen tech — goes subsequent.
Set up view of Umber Majeed, “Untitled” (2025), 3-channel video set up with sound, ceramics, and vinyl
Left: screenshot of directions for AR activation of artworks on iPhone; proper: screenshot of Umber Majeed, “zoom in” (2024) as seen by way of the iPhone digicam
Set up view of Umber Majeed, “Timeline” (2024–25), PVC vinyl, ~15.7 x 45.1 ft (~4.8 x 13.7 m)
Set up view of Umber Majeed, “Joy Tech License” (2024), combined media on paper
Set up view of Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH
Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH continues on the Queens Museum (Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens) by way of January 18, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Lindsey Berfond.
