Xu Bing’s You Inhuman Thing invites participants to take an online test examining what it is that makes one ‘human’. Pulling from web content, video games, and trending news, the work poses a series of absurd questions, forcing participants to reconsider pre-existing definitions of humanity. What separates humans from non-humans? And who—or what—appears more human? At the end, participants receive a personal verdict on how ‘human’ they are alongside a corresponding ‘Little Flesh Person’ icon, suggesting that the line between these two categories is no longer clear.

In a time when artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies rapidly evolve, Xu Bing proposes that ‘human’ as a concept has been destabilised. As AI becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the human it imitates, and machines gradually replace human capabilities, the identities of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ become interchangeable, leaving humanity without its existential coordinates in the universe.

Ultimately, the work transforms the Chinese insult ‘you inhuman thing’—used to describe someone cold and heartless—into a deep interrogation of our current technology and human subjectivity. In the future, ‘you inhuman thing’ may well be a compliment.

Xu Bing (b. 1955, Chongqing) is a visual artist and a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. A MacArthur Fellow, he is widely recognised as one of China’s leading conceptual artists. Throughout his career, he has expanded the boundaries of art, working across different media to question the act of image-making and its perception. He was the winner of the Artes Mundi Prize and received the Medal of Arts from the US Department of State. Xu’s work has been exhibited and collected by art institutions around the world, including M+.