Ai Makita: Metabolizing Machine

Baert Gallery is pleased to present Metabolizing Machine, Ai Makita’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition builds upon a practice Makita has spent developing since 2011, following the catastrophic nuclear incident at Fukushima. This nuclear disaster brought forth the reality that human-made technology is capable of growing beyond the capacity and handling of its creators. Makita’s paintings visualize this fear of machines spiraling out of control to become living organisms. 

The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from Masahiro Morioka’s 2023 essay Artificial Intelligence and Contemporary Philosophy, which considers how Hans Jonas, a student of Heidegger, developed the concept of “metabolism” and how it might unfold within contemporary machine society. What fundamentally separates living beings from artificial life is the presence or absence of metabolism—a notion that Makita found deeply compelling. If machines were ever to metabolize autonomously, they might become dominant forces within human society. While this realization carries an element of fear, Makita’s works also reflect on the possibility that machines could aid in human survival, presenting a fragile balance between fear and hope.

The paintings themselves are a technical tug-of-war in which the artist volleys between hand and computer generation - Makita begins by first photographing engines and machine parts, then feeds the images to an AI generator, and finally paints the scenes that result, thereby grounding the imagery back into physicality. While creating her painting Flux, Makita encountered a struggle with the system in the interpretation of her prompts, a miscommunication between the artist and her tool that felt oddly collaborative. The result visually resembles a division of cells, an unmissable parallel to the development of life. 

Installed in conversation with the paintings, the sculptural Forms are Makita’s first foray into three-dimensional works, each an elaboration of the depth and spatial relationships within her paintings realized as objects. The sculptures build upon the existing dialogue between two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional space created through elements of perspective in her paintings. The familiarity of chrome tubing calls to mind a more utilitarian object, but as an art object, we can admire the artistic aspects and humanizing beauty in its construction. 

Achieved through both scale and perspective, Makita’s compositions become atmospheric, landscape-like abstractions where pipes, bolts, engine parts and chrome tubing twist into a complex network of neurons. The cadence of motion implies a breathing brain capable of autonomous thought - standing in front of it, one cannot help but to become enveloped by the machine as the foreground imagery escapes the edges of the canvas to envelop its viewer, drawing one deeper into the intricacies of the canvas’s background. Makita’s liberal use of color withdraws us from the association with cold, grey machine parts, instead embedding a sense of vitality in the metallic elements. There is all at once a sense of unease and impending circumstance, as well as an admiration for the complexity and nearly sublime beauty in the landscape made entirely of machines.

Ai Makita is a Tokyo-based painter whose work explores the border of artificial and natural, drawing inspiration from the relationships between human technology and the sublime. Makita received an MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2013, as well as an MFA from Tokyo Gakugei University in 2010.

Recent exhibitions include Form and Matter, Tokyo 8min, Tokyo (2025); A Thousand Ways to Objecthood, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Taichung (2025); The Coming World 2025–2075, GYRE Omotesando, Tokyo (2025); 人工的神々 – Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God, PARCEL, Tokyo (2024); Prosthetic Gods, The Something Machine, New York (2024); and Interspecies, Mitsukoshi Contemporary, Tokyo (2024). She has participated in residencies at The Fores Project (London), ART CAKE (New York), Residency Unlimited (New York), and the Varda Artist Residency (Sausalito). Makita’s works are included in the collections of the Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, Chiba Bank, and the Takahashi Collection.