Current Exhibition

Reception: Friday April 10, 2026 6-9 PM

Open Sundays and Mondays 4-7 PM & by appointment


Ara Hao, Untitled Brown, 2025

SWIM Gallery is pleased to present CLOSE DESIRE, an exhibition of new work by Bay Area artist Ara Hao (b. 1997, Mountain View, CA) on view April 10–May 9, 2026. Featuring a large scale oil painting and eight works on paper, this exhibition reveals Hao’s five-year-long inquiry into how contemporary visual experience, shaped by emerging technologies, is reprocessed through the body, producing works where the presence of the human hand and AI cannot be parsed separately.

Central to the work is the natural world itself—specifically, the dense, entangled visual field of foliage, whose chromatic intensity and structural complexity resist stable perception. In this sense, the subject is not passively observed but actively exceeds the limits of human vision, producing a form of visual opacity in which color, depth, and form are difficult to apprehend in their entirety.

This perceptual instability is mirrored and reconfigured through algorithmic processes. Photographic source material is processed through AI systems that, in their own opaque manner, parse and reorganize visual information. Hao’s paintings and drawings emerge through a sustained engagement with generated images, which function as a secondary site of perception. Through slow, embodied labor, the artist reinterprets these algorithmically mediated forms, effectively translating a machine’s “reading” of nature into a human register.

What results is a qualitatively distinct synthesis—one that renders visible the otherwise inaccessible interplay between natural phenomena, machine vision, and human attention.

Ara Hao, In Blue (detail) , 2025