The Great Unlearning: An AUT PhD group exhibition
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The Great Unlearning brings together four AUT doctoral researchers working across sound, installation, and visual art. The exhibition takes its name from a shared condition running through the work: the sense that making art at this level involves not only acquiring new knowledge but questioning and dismantling what has already been absorbed — about perception, identity, systems, and the body.
The works gathered here approach this unlearning from different directions. Jingrui Han examines what happens when the feedback between action and response becomes unreliable. Junchang Zhang turns attention to the hidden acoustic life of architecture, asking listeners to attend to how sound shapes feeling before meaning arrives. Beth Dawson (Ducklingmonster) offers an intimate, durational field recording from the edge of Karangahape Rd, holding open a space for the temporary, the collective, and the overlooked. P Wits works through the iconography of rock music, unpicking the myths of masculinity embedded in images so familiar they have become invisible.
Together the works share a commitment to uncertainty as a productive condition — to the idea that perception, agency, and identity are not fixed but continuously shaped, questioned, and remade.
Works
Jingrui Han — Markov Gesture Installation (RIFT)
A camera-based motion tracking system captures real-time gesture data, mapping movement into discrete states processed through a Markov transition model. Rather than producing direct responses, the system generates stochastic trajectories where gesture influences likelihood rather than outcome — sound and image evolving through weighted transitions shaped by both human movement and algorithmic memory. The work asks how a sense of agency is sustained, or undone, when the world no longer returns our actions as confirmation, but responds instead through ambiguity, drift, and transformation.
Ducklingmonster — 15:00–19:00 T.G.I.F. K.rd.
At the end of the winter solstice work week, an unreliable listener makes a field recording of Karangahape Rd from their apartment window.
Junchang Zhang — The Beginning of Everything
A room listens to itself. Vibrations hidden within walls, floors, and objects are amplified and dispersed throughout the space, punctuated by sudden sonic intrusions — impacts, breaths, fragments of voices — that appear and disappear before they can be fully understood. The work examines how sound constructs emotional experience through uncertainty, anticipation, and recognition, inviting listeners to become aware of their own acts of listening.
P Wits — Untitled wall works
A series of wall works by Auckland artist P Wits. Working across collage, print, and graphic design, P Wits draws on the visual language of rock music — album covers, music press photography, promotional imagery — to probe the myths and contradictions of masculine identity. Familiar icons are pulled from their original context and recombined, turning the bravado of rock iconography into something stranger and more ambiguous. The works are untitled, leaving viewers to bring their own histories and associations to images that are at once recognisable and unsettled.
Artist Bios
Jingrui Han (Zeb) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher working across film, games, and interactive audiovisual systems. His practice explores human–machine entanglement through sound, perception, and real-time interaction, constructing environments in which the body is an active component within feedback loops that continuously reshape sonic and visual perception.
Beth Dawson, aka Ducklingmonster, is an audio-visual artist from Onehunga, Tāmaki Makaurau. She is currently a kaiako and PhD candidate at AUT, School of Visual Art & Design, with her practice-based research into a queer feminist elevating and valuing that which is temporary, collective, amateur, and improvised.
https://ducklingmonster.com
Junchang Zhang is a sound artist, field recordist, and researcher based in Auckland. Working across multichannel audio, installation, and audiovisual media, his practice investigates listening as an emotional and perceptual act, exploring how sonic experiences shape meaning before conscious interpretation occurs. He is currently undertaking doctoral research at AUT.
https://jczhang.bandcamp.com
P Wits is a Tāmaki-based artist working in sound and print. He began his doctoral research at AUT in 2025. The works in this show are collages and prints made as part of this ongoing research.
https://pwits.bandcamp.com/
Opens: Wednesday 8 July, 5.30pm, with refreshments by Liberty Breweries
Hours: 12 – 4pm, Wednesday – Saturday
Closes: Saturday 1 August
The works gathered here approach this unlearning from different directions. Jingrui Han examines what happens when the feedback between action and response becomes unreliable. Junchang Zhang turns attention to the hidden acoustic life of architecture, asking listeners to attend to how sound shapes feeling before meaning arrives. Beth Dawson (Ducklingmonster) offers an intimate, durational field recording from the edge of Karangahape Rd, holding open a space for the temporary, the collective, and the overlooked. P Wits works through the iconography of rock music, unpicking the myths of masculinity embedded in images so familiar they have become invisible.
Together the works share a commitment to uncertainty as a productive condition — to the idea that perception, agency, and identity are not fixed but continuously shaped, questioned, and remade.
Works
Jingrui Han — Markov Gesture Installation (RIFT)
A camera-based motion tracking system captures real-time gesture data, mapping movement into discrete states processed through a Markov transition model. Rather than producing direct responses, the system generates stochastic trajectories where gesture influences likelihood rather than outcome — sound and image evolving through weighted transitions shaped by both human movement and algorithmic memory. The work asks how a sense of agency is sustained, or undone, when the world no longer returns our actions as confirmation, but responds instead through ambiguity, drift, and transformation.
Ducklingmonster — 15:00–19:00 T.G.I.F. K.rd.
At the end of the winter solstice work week, an unreliable listener makes a field recording of Karangahape Rd from their apartment window.
Junchang Zhang — The Beginning of Everything
A room listens to itself. Vibrations hidden within walls, floors, and objects are amplified and dispersed throughout the space, punctuated by sudden sonic intrusions — impacts, breaths, fragments of voices — that appear and disappear before they can be fully understood. The work examines how sound constructs emotional experience through uncertainty, anticipation, and recognition, inviting listeners to become aware of their own acts of listening.
P Wits — Untitled wall works
A series of wall works by Auckland artist P Wits. Working across collage, print, and graphic design, P Wits draws on the visual language of rock music — album covers, music press photography, promotional imagery — to probe the myths and contradictions of masculine identity. Familiar icons are pulled from their original context and recombined, turning the bravado of rock iconography into something stranger and more ambiguous. The works are untitled, leaving viewers to bring their own histories and associations to images that are at once recognisable and unsettled.
Artist Bios
Jingrui Han (Zeb) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher working across film, games, and interactive audiovisual systems. His practice explores human–machine entanglement through sound, perception, and real-time interaction, constructing environments in which the body is an active component within feedback loops that continuously reshape sonic and visual perception.
Beth Dawson, aka Ducklingmonster, is an audio-visual artist from Onehunga, Tāmaki Makaurau. She is currently a kaiako and PhD candidate at AUT, School of Visual Art & Design, with her practice-based research into a queer feminist elevating and valuing that which is temporary, collective, amateur, and improvised.
https://ducklingmonster.com
Junchang Zhang is a sound artist, field recordist, and researcher based in Auckland. Working across multichannel audio, installation, and audiovisual media, his practice investigates listening as an emotional and perceptual act, exploring how sonic experiences shape meaning before conscious interpretation occurs. He is currently undertaking doctoral research at AUT.
https://jczhang.bandcamp.com
P Wits is a Tāmaki-based artist working in sound and print. He began his doctoral research at AUT in 2025. The works in this show are collages and prints made as part of this ongoing research.
https://pwits.bandcamp.com/
Opens: Wednesday 8 July, 5.30pm, with refreshments by Liberty Breweries
Hours: 12 – 4pm, Wednesday – Saturday
Closes: Saturday 1 August
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Where is it happening?
4 Poynton Terrace, Auckland, New Zealand
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherAudio Foundation
