Concrete
Uncertainties

Since 2018, more than half of the global population has been living in urban areas—a historical turning point. By 2030, this share is projected to reach 60%. Few places illustrate the scale and speed of this shift as dramatically as Shenzhen, China, which evolved from a fishing village of roughly 30,000 inhabitants into a metropolis of more than 12.5 million within just three decades. Despite such rapid and often extreme urbanization—and the escalating ecological, social, and psychological pressures that accompany it—the urban environment is largely accepted by its inhabitants as a natural and unquestioned condition of contemporary life. The built world is experienced as an implicit norm, even as its consequences become increasingly difficult to ignore. CONCRETE UNCERTAINTIES responds to this paradox. Through artistic interventions by DTA and Iyho that traverse street art, typography, painting, photography, and digital distortion, the exhibition investigates how urban space is perceived, inhabited, and imagined. The works consider the precarious future of cities in an era marked by resource scarcity, climate volatility, and shifting social dynamics, revealing the tension between stability and fragility that defines contemporary urban existence. Extending beyond the exhibition walls, Iyho presents a combined text-based and walk-in installation situated in the green outdoor area of the studios. By interweaving spatial encounter and written language, the installation blurs the boundary between the constructed and the natural, the readable and the experiential. Visitors move through a landscape where text becomes part of the terrain, guiding and disrupting perception while prompting reflection on the narratives that shape our relationship to the urban world. In this hybrid environment—where vegetation, built structures, and artistic interventions coexist—questions arise about how we occupy space, how we define “nature,” and how our (urban) living conditions may evolve in the face of accelerating change. Together, the works inside and outside the exhibition space invite a reconsideration of the environments we create and inherit, and of the uncertain trajectories that lie ahead for the cities we increasingly call home.