RUBY CHEN, Paradise Lost, 2025 (Detail)
Presenting work by Ruby Chen and Miles Scharff
14 - 18 October 2025
Mandrake Hotel, London, United Kingdom
Contact: info@lumka.com
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LUmkA is pleased to present selected works by gallery artists Ruby Chen and Miles Scharff.
Chen, informed by evolutionary cosmologies and cybernetic theory, stages a bifurcated tableau: a lone figure gazes upon a passenger-less motorcycle. The juxtaposing images crystallize the estrangement between the body and the machine, illustrating how power and agency migrate seamlessly from the body to the apparatus. Chen’s work raises the question of whether technology remains a prosthetic extension of the mortal form or, having crossed an ontological threshold, now operates independently under its own autonomous desire.
Scharff, a sound artist and former physicist, invents, records, and stages interactions between tangible objects and intangible signals. His apparatus intercepts the electromagnetic field and re-encodes it as modulated sound and improvisatory motion. By converting an immaterial signal into a perceptible form, Scharff reframes materiality, revealing how contemporary objects are inseparable from the data that courses through them.
Through Chen’s tensile imagery and Scharff’s translated vibrations, both artists anthropomorphize technology and technologize the body, revealing the boundary between human and machine as a permeable, shifting membrane.
RUBY CHEN (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in sculptures and paintings, whose works are inspired by ancient cultures and primal human compulsions. Fascinated by the contrast of human desires, and the societal structures in which they exist under, Chen inquires on the clashing yet coexisting impulses: the urge to break free of confinement and be reborn anew, versus the inevitability of repeating and fixating on the past. The artist’s works often incorporate humanoid materials such as skin-textured wax, tangled hair, and beating sounds, and are installed under a hyper- contextualized environment, reflecting Chen’s engagement with both the unconscious human psyche and socio-political theories.
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Chen’s work has recently been exhibited by NADA, NYC, Komune, NYC, and Alexia Project, Shanghai, among others. The artist’s work has been reviewed by publications such as Elephant Art Magazine, IMPULSE Magazine, Mundane Magazine, and HAZZE Media, among others.
MILES SCHARFF (b. 1999) is a sound artist and improvisor working with radio electronics, sound sculpture, video, spatial audio, and performance. His current research explores how everyday objects double as involuntary antennas, absorbing and re-broadcasting stray electromagnetic and acoustic signals. Spawned by telecom and other industrial systems, this accidental relay points continuum that stretches from the epistemic rigor of Western science to its détournement by conspiratorial and fringe-spiritualist cultures. He builds devices and software that stage, record, and recontextualize these object–signal interactions, transducing latent fields into audible and kinetic forms; granting physical presence to phenomena that usually escape perception, situating them in relation to our bodies, architectures, and ecologies. His aim is not to affix a definitive truth, but to materialize the unseen so that it can be examined—critically and sensorially—within the complex infrastructures that shape contemporary experience.
Scharff has exhibited at LUmkA, New Uncanny, Fridman Gallery, Wallach Gallery, SK Gallery, Alice Holt Forest, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Rube Goldberg Foundation. He is the 2024 recipient of the Genelec Dr. Ilpo Martikainen Audio Visionary Scholarship and earned his MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University (2025).