Nestled amid neoclassical facades and street-art-splashed alleyways, The Holy Art’s Athens space unveiled its latest edition of “Art On Loop,” the gallery’s roving showcase of emergent and established digital-media voices. This year’s programme, drawn from a competitive open call that attracted entries from more than forty countries, featured Scent Breath by China-born, U.S.-based designer-artist Liying Peng, a work that probes the porous boundary between organic sensation and synthetic memory.
Founded in London in 2020, The Holy Art has expanded at a striking pace, establishing bricks-and-mortar or pop-up venues in a dozen cultural capitals—including New York, Paris, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and, since 2023, Athens—while maintaining an always-on virtual programme. The gallery describes its mission as cultivating “a global art community” that offers artists both physical and digital stages and connects them with collectors across continents. Independent arts site ArtDeadline recently characterised the organisation as “an international powerhouse within the world of contemporary and modern art,” citing its curatorial ambition and multi-city exhibition circuit. “Art On Loop” is the flagship of that circuit. Each instalment converts a host city into a multi-screen, mixed-media laboratory, with floor-to-ceiling projections, sculptural lightboxes, and VR touchpoints that dissolve the line between a gallery visit and an immersive installation.
Athens has quietly transformed into a European nexus for experimental media, anchored by institutions such as the Athens Digital Arts Festival and the Athens Biennale, both lauded for championing boundary-pushing practice. The Holy Art plugs into this ferment, situating its venue in buzzy Praxitelous Street and timing “Art On Loop” to coincide with the city’s late-spring constellation of art happenings. According to Eventbrite’s events index, the May 16 private view drew a full house, underscoring the show’s pull for local collectors, visiting curators, and culture-hungry tourists alike.
Peng’s contribution occupies a darkened alcove where suspended OLED panels cycle through slow-motion clouds of colour and data-driven topographies. The work belongs to her ongoing series “Sensory Generations,” which interrogates how algorithmic systems can be trained not merely to recognise the world but to remember it. Sensory Generations is a speculative meditation on perception in the age of synthetic reality. Each piece in the series begins with a sensory impulse — a breath, a scent, a sound — and unfolds into a world where the organic and artificial converge.
“Can a dataset long for something it has never truly sensed?” Peng muses in her artist statement. “Scent Breath is my attempt to give code a phantom nostalgia.” The piece resonates with the exhibition’s curatorial through-line: material-immaterial entanglements and the poetics of the post-photographic image.
Peng first gained recognition in 2018, when her visual identity for High Concept Lab’s Open House received an American Graphic Design Award. Though rooted in visual communication, her work has since evolved toward more interactive, user-centered experiences—shaped by a curiosity about how design mediates trust between people and technology. In Scent Breath, this evolution takes on a poetic dimension. “I’m fascinated by how everyday objects train us to trust machines,” she explains. “With Scent Breath, I reverse that flow—I invite the machine to trust our most ephemeral data: scent, breath, memory.”
Participation in “Art On Loop” positions Peng for a busy year ahead. The Holy Art routinely syndicates standout works to its satellite pop-ups in New York and London, and curators from the Seoul MediArt Biennale were reportedly in attendance during the Athens vernissage.
Operating from hubs in London, New York, Paris, Athens and beyond, The Holy Art champions voices through hybrid exhibitions, artist residencies, and an expansive digital archive. Its shows have been staged everywhere from the OXO Bargehouse on London’s South Bank to industrial lofts in Tribeca, drawing thousands of visitors and an international roster of press and institutional buyers. By coupling an agile curatorial model with global syndication, the gallery has reimagined the pipeline through which emerging artists converge with the market and the museum sphere alike.
Written by- Andrew Choy
