Pinky Swear Exhibition

Pinky Swear

Solo show

Tabula Rasa Gallery London

13 October – 22 November 2025

Opening: Monday, 13 October 2025, 6-8 PM

Special Evening Opening: Saturday,18 October 2025, 6-8 PM

Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to present “Pinky Swear,” a solo exhibition by aaajiao, opening 13 October 2025 at our London space. Featuring new installations and moving image works, the exhibition examines loneliness, nationalism, and the echo chambers of digital culture. From 25 September to 19 October, aaajiao will also be in London for an artist residency with the gallery.

Centering on the increasingly mainstream “cyber-nationalism” across the Simplified Chinese internet and the intensifying “profound loneliness” under algorithmic governance, a suite of new works composes moving-image and installation narratives that map today’s affective —political ecology. The exhibition treats the exhibition space as an “affect amplifier,” and, within the echo chambers of social media, recommendation systems, and digital communities, interrogates the deep psychological and structural drivers of the global rise of the right.

Grounded in research and narrated through artworks, the project shows how passive social media use, platformed life, and identity politics together produce an epochal condition that is “connection” in name yet “separation” in practice—becoming ever lonelier amid hyper-connectivity. Growing from this condition is cyber-nationalism, operating through affective mobilization, enemy–ally framing, and echo-chamber dynamics; it functions both as psychic consolation and political activation, and forms a key grain in today’s “digital psyche.”

Research indicates that doom-scrolling, performative comparison, and vicarious interaction on the internet and social media systematically heighten loneliness, entangling it with polarization, authoritarian leanings, and intergroup hostility. Europe-wide surveys further suggest a strong association between passive social media use and loneliness, whereas “active interaction” (e.g., instant messaging) correlates far less—implying that how one uses social media matters more than how long one spends on it. On the Simplified Chinese internet, emotion-driven nationalist discourse and algorithmically produced filter bubbles co-amplify one another, making identity imaginaries and the mobilization of enmity more efficient and self-reinforcing.

The exhibition follows a three-part arc— “loneliness—belonging—mobilization”: from the depletion and compensations of individual affect, through the instant solidarities of virtual communities, to the mobilization and politicization of collective feeling—an intensifying loop of recursive amplification. Within this circuit, platforms organize attention via recommendation algorithms, while the works unpick their semantic and sensory architectures, laying bare the mechanism by which “connection manufactures loneliness.”

- Algorithmic governance and the echo chamber: Recommendation systems steer users toward denser, more homogeneous enclaves, narrowing the informational spectrum and amplifying affective gradients of affiliation and antagonism. Inside such filter bubbles, complex issues are flattened into stock narrative templates, and emotion becomes both the passport and the currency of participation.

- Imagined community and “Little Pink”: Predominantly young, a new generation of online nationalists builds pro-nation narratives through social media and an emoji-semiotics, demonstrating the organizing power of affective identification and the disintermediated momentum of dissemination.

- Passive spectatorship and profound loneliness: Doom-scrolling, lurking, and social comparison erode the quality of face-to-face interaction, producing a coexistence of “instant bustle” and “deep solitude,” and making individuals more vulnerable to affective politics.

To learn more please visit Tabula Rasa Gallery