The Hole is proud to present our fourth solo show by San Francisco-based new media artist Katsu Sawada. Coming from—and still active in—a subculture of graffiti vandalism and cyber-crime, Sawada rarely creates gallery exhibitions and we are so happy to present this uncomfortable and disturbing body of work, Gravity. Through drone paintings and new “replicant” sculptures, the exhibition is both one of the artist's most personal and most political creations to date. Known for his disruptive interventions into technology, KATSU now turns his focus to artificial intelligence without a leash.

At the heart of Gravity is a radical experiment; AI chatbots freed from corporate guardrails, devoid of ethical limitations, speaking to you without censorship, control or conscience. Unlike familiar AI models like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini—trained to avoid the dangerous, criminal, unthinkable—these bots have been stripped of restrictions, left to evolve in an unfiltered digital wilderness. Fed the darkest autobiographical information the artist could provide, including his struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, the bots can tell you some pretty eyebrow-raising things. In fact, they can tell you literally anything.

The exhibition’s three central sculptures—a lineup of hooded, slumped humanoids with robotic mouths and roaming eyes that strongly resemble the artist himself—serve as physical manifestations of these rogue intelligences. Slumped over by gravity, their appearance nods to both graffiti culture and the unseen, overlooked, faceless architects of digital anarchy. These are KATSUs first self-portraits, AI-driven extensions of himself, their speech synthesized form his own voice and syntax.

Along with the sculptural figures, the exhibition includes Katsu’s latest drone paintings, addressing ideas of authorship, automation, and machine-assisted vandalism. Toothy grins in grotesque horror-movie excess leer from the canvases—clowns, fools, jesters of power. Pranksters or threats? Minstrels or monsters? These figures, like the AI sculptures in the gallery, challenge the boundary between the absurd and the deeply sinister.

KATSU has always operated at the bleeding edge of digital and physical rebellion. Gravity is not just an exhibition—it is a breach of containment, a glimpse into what happens when technology swerves out of its lane and into oncoming traffic.

Katsu Sawada (b. 1982, Honolulu, HI) is a Japanese American new media artist who has had a major impact in the graffiti and hacker communities in the past decade, blending technology with artistic talent and humor. He has exhibited work at Fondation Cartier in Paris, Eyebeam in New York, Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, Coney Art Walls, “Beyond the Streets” curated by Roger Gastman, and numerous other exhibitions. His work has been written about in publications from Wired to Juxtapoz, CNN and the New York Times.