A prehistoric face generated by artificial intelligence stares back at the contemporary viewer in Wenfei Quan's solo exhibition Contemporary Hominin at TaThaTa. The term "hominin" refers to all species within the human lineage following its evolutionary divergence from chimpanzees and bonobos. The "contemporary hominin," then, denotes not only an ancient human transported into the present, but also modern humans themselves. In this solo exhibition, curated by Xiao Liu, Quan positions contemporary human beings in a strange temporal dance with our ancestry and an AI-mediated future.

In the photographic series Mole (2026) mounted on lightboxes, Quan identifies the natural moles on each human subject’s face and uses makeup to add a matching mark on the opposite side before photographing them. The intervention is minor, yet the imposed bilateral symmetry makes each face feel uncanny, turning each subject strangely alien. In her new print series Familiar Aliens (2026), the sense of estrangement is reiterated through the human gaze. Quan begins with color fundus photographs of her own retinas, enlarges them, and prints them by silkscreen. The symmetrical veins and retinal structures begin to resemble branching landscapes, tree roots, or otherworldly cellular forms. Through Quan’s repeated reversal, transfer, doubling, and repetition, alien forms are born from our own bodies.

The title work, Contemporary Hominin (2026), stages an encounter between the prehistoric past and the present. "Contemporary" situates us in the immediate present, while "hominin" places us within the longer history of human evolution. The installation brings an AI-generated avatar of a prehistoric human into the gallery, where it feels decidedly out of place among the other contemporary subjects. Its face, printed on transparent film, appears in close-up, with white irises that create an uncanny and alienating effect. Looking into the figure's eyes, the viewer also sees two Earths in rotation—a reminder of the vast stretch of time since the first hominin walked the planet. By doing this, Quan positions the contemporary hominin—Homo sapiens, the only surviving human species—within a larger evolutionary timeline: hindsight might tempt us to believe that we are at the end of progress, but the present is just another stage in a history we can only partially comprehend.

Standing among these faces, the viewer begins to feel watched. What looks back at us is not quite human: mole-symmetrical faces, retinas resembling alien organisms, an AI-generated ancestor. These altered figures resemble possible future versions of ourselves, shaped through AI's attempts to read, reproduce, and reconstruct the human image, producing creatures that resemble ordinary people yet seem eerily off-putting. This discomfort reminds us of how clueless and blindsided we remain by AI's abilities, much like a prehistoric human encountering an unfamiliar technological world.

What makes Contemporary Hominin compelling is the restraint of Quan’s interventions: a painted mole or mirrored retina makes the familiar strange. This restraint extends to printmaking, where small shifts in registration preserve traces of the maker’s hand against AI’s frictionless image generation. The medium thus performs a kind of “human verification,” a term Quan often uses to describe her practice. By drawing parallels with paleoanthropology, Quan suggests that just as we reconstruct our ancestors from bones and footprints, a future observer may one day piece us together from the digital traces we leave behind—the very ruins Quan excavates as an "internet archaeologist." The exhibition asks viewers to imagine themselves not as the culmination of history, but as its next artifact. 

Wenfei Quan: Contemporary Hominin is on view at TaThaTa Gallery, New York, from September 11 to October 10, 2026. The exhibition is curated by Xiao Liu.