Ian Douglas-Jones in ‘TRACERIES’, Design Shanghai 2026

Auckland and Shanghai-based artist and architectural designer Ian Douglas-Jones is presenting three major kinetic light installations at TRACERIES, an international group exhibition that challenges digital culture. TRACERIES is a satellite exhibition of Design Shanghai 2026, one of Asia’s most prestigious design events.

Opening 4 March at Park Dimanche in Shanghai, the exhibition showcases Douglas-Jones’s distinctive practice at the intersection of architecture, art and technology, work that insists on the irreplaceable value of physical experience in an age of infinite digital reproducibility.

“We live in an era of perfect digital copies and frictionless screens,” says Douglas-Jones, whose practice spans fine art, spatial design and large-scale public installations. “TRACERIES is our reaction to this smoothness. It’s about reality kicking back, light that leaves traces, matter that ages and evolves, cities that remember.”

For TRACERIES, Atelier I-N-D-J brings together six international artists whose work explores how physical materials age, change and resist digital perfection. TRACERIES is an exhibition about resistance to digital culture. It brings together works that celebrate the unique flaws, scars and traces that prove authentic human presence, insisting that beauty lies not in seamless reproduction but in the marks left by physical reality.

Exhibiting artist Ian Douglas-Jones’s emphasis on materiality, slow craft and physical degradation connects directly to New Zealand’s strong tradition of materials-based art and craftsmanship. At a time when AI-generated images flood social media, his work champions the irreplaceable qualities of hand-made, time-intensive processes, values deeply embedded in New Zealand’s creative culture.

His Auckland-Shanghai practice model demonstrates how New Zealand artists can maintain significant international careers whilst staying rooted at home, offering a fresh perspective on sustainable creative practice in a globalised art world. Trained as an architect, Douglas-Jones has built a significant international profile working between Auckland and Shanghai. As creative director of Atelier I-N-D-J, the studio he co-founded with his partner Sabrina Douglas-Jones, he’s created acclaimed installations for major brands and cultural institutions across China, including a 4.5-metre fractal light sculpture at Beijing GuoMao and a 12-metre sound-and-light installation in Wuhan.

Douglas-Jones presents three works plus one documented work:

Halo XL (2025) – The exhibition’s centrepiece is a monumental 7.5-metre diameter kinetic sculpture. Motorised armatures trace invisible double-helix patterns through space with twin light sources, ephemeral geometries that exist only in real time. Unlike our culture of endless image capture, these luminous trajectories dissolve into oblivion, deliberately challenging viewers to experience unrecorded moments. Visitors can interact with the installation via console controls that vary motor speeds, directly shaping the patterns that emerge and immediately vanish.

“Halo XL is a quiet resistance to our saturated digital world, where we capture multiple instant images without any cost or consequence, by returning us to the poetry of physical light seen in real time,” Douglas-Jones explains.

Halo XL is documented by a work called Analog Past (Halo XL)(2026). In collaboration with photographer Anthony Reed, Douglas-Jones presents a series of three large-format film photographs (120 x 90 cm) that capture the invisible patterns of Halo XL through long-exposure analogue photography. Over minutes of complete darkness, light accumulates on silver-halide film, coaxing the installation’s double-helices into existence as dense, glowing spirals. The resulting prints bear the unmistakable grain and unrepeatable aura of analogue processes, a deliberate counter to digital culture’s perfect reproduction.

UV Trace (2025) – A two-metre diameter carbon fibre sculpture with a motorised armature that glides across canvas, carving invisible pathways through space. UV-reactive pigments appear under invisible light, illuminating traces of prior trajectories, creating what Douglas-Jones calls “a luminous archive of what would otherwise be lost.”

Seen-Unseen (2022) is a dynamic, motorised lighting installation of brushed aluminium that breaks the cycle return to light’s fundamental properties through precision mechanics and optical glass, revealing the technological labour behind even basic optical effects.

Five international artists extend the exhibition’s exploration of material resistance:

Russian artist Vasily Betin presents three works: Phaneroscopy presents custom 3D-printed cameras that mimic the brain’s limited visual bandwidth, and a series of dark, blurry images they produce that are ‘sediments of time’. This work deconstructs what we see and mimics our subjective memory. Now is a series of unique timepieces that offer a lens on mortality, balance, recursion, that challenge the wearer to start perceiving instead of consuming time. Space is a series of photographic images, UV-printed onto raw aluminium panels that witness the final moments of a cultural sanctuary before it was demolished to make way for a new property development.

Romanian artist Alex Damboianu presents Orthodox icons that are the ‘scars’ or imprints of oxidised rusted industrial metal and organic decay on cloth.

Twin photographers Anthony and Phillip Reed (based in Shanghai and New York respectively) present atmospheric studies of Shanghai’s demolition sites; Concrete Reflections is a series of digital photographs of Shanghai’s relentless cycle of demolition and renewal. A Happy Arrangement is a series of digital photographs of abandoned artifacts from demolition sites.

The City DNA series / Shanghai No.20 (1-4) by Shanghai-based painter Lu Xinjian presents four works on canvas that translate urban patterns into hand-painted geometric abstractions that resist digital reproduction through painstaking manual labour. His series of two paintings, Matrix observes cities from impossible viewpoints, transforming urban sprawl into a visual language.

About Ian Douglas-Jones

Ian Douglas – Jones 董杰毅 BA(Hons)Arch MA(RCA)Arch is an artist and architectural designer whose practice operates at the intersection of kinetic sculpture, spatial design and material enquiry. Based between Auckland and Shanghai, he creates large-scale kinetic sculptures that question our relationship to time, light and memory.

His artistic practice informs his architectural thinking, whilst his understanding of space and structure enables ambitious sculptural works that bridge gallery contexts and public installations. Douglas-Jones’s autotelic, hands-on approach spans coding, fabrication and theory, producing acclaimed works that demonstrate how technical mastery and humanist concerns coexist in contemporary practice.

Exhibition producer Atelier I-N-D-J produces, designs and manufactures ideas that translate artistic and architectural concepts into immersive experiences.

Recent projects include Sirpenski Tensegrity (a 4.5-metre fractal light sculpture in Beijing, 2022), Nebula (a 12-metre installation combining light and structured sound in Wuhan, 2024), the Bentley Kinetic Wall (96 square metres of choreographed aluminium elements, 2023), and installations for Versace that merge mythology, technology and spatial experience.

To find more exhibitions around the world by New Zealand artists, visit ArtNow.NZ