What if cosmic visitors aren't approaching from the stars—but are the fellow travellers we pass by every single day?

Following his 2023 Hong Kong exhibition “Moon Lands On Man”—an immersive cardboard installation where a playful toy-store façade concealed a hidden Area 51 control room and a staged moon-landing conspiracy—acclaimed American artist Barminski returns to JPS Gallery with “Runway 51”. Expanding his world of meticulously constructed illusions, Barminski now transforms the gallery into a full-scale cardboard airport. As the ultimate modern symbol of transit, strict geopolitical boundaries, and heavily regulated borders, the airport serves as the perfect staging ground to introduce the concept of extraterrestrial interception on Earth. 

Inside this intergalactic cardboard terminal, the familiar stages of air travel begin to drift off course. Visitors pass through a security checkpoint, departure lounge, airport select shop, and restroom, each rendered in bold black lines and vivid blocks of colour, each tilting the journey further from routine into speculation. 

👽 Station 1: Your First "Close Encounter"

The first encounter is strangely familiar. Visitors enter through a full-scale cardboard security checkpoint, where an extraterrestrial transit worker presides over a conveyor belt carrying Barminski’s upcoming CASETiFY travel-line collaboration. The familiar choreography of modern travel unfolds: the scanner, the inspection, the quiet surrender of personal belongings.

The scene makes “first contact” feel strangely ordinary. The alien does not descend from the sky or wait behind a sealed door; it is already here, calmly performing one of modern life’s most familiar rituals. What should be a rupture becomes a procedure, playfully suggesting that aliens may not be arriving from some distant elsewhere but are already deeply embedded in the systems we trust, obey, and pass through every day.

🛍️ Station 2: Taking the "Conspiracy" Home

Beyond the checkpoint, visitors enter the departure lounge and the airport select shop, where travel retail takes an intergalactic turn. Stiff cardboard seating, towering hand-painted flight boards, and shelves of Barminski’s original sculptures transform the space into a cabinet of cosmic curiosities. Here, the vast and intimidating unknown is playfully shrunk into safe, collectable merchandise. Yet as visitors browse, the commercial illusion cracks—suggesting these items are not merely pop-culture souvenirs, but fragments of a profound truth hiding in plain sight.

✨ Station 3: Restroom at the Edge of the Galaxy

The journey takes a surreal turn in the terminal restroom, where the ordinary act of checking one’s reflection dissolves into an infinite void. Above the sinks, the mirrors do not reflect the viewer’s face. Instead, they reveal a distant galaxy, replacing the expected image of the self with the depth of outer space.

The familiar reflection disappears, and with it, the comforting idea of being at the centre of existence. In its place is the universe: distant, silent, and immeasurable. With one simple gesture, Barminski turns a restroom mirror into a moment of cosmic perspective, asking visitors to look beyond themselves and consider their place within a scale far larger than the systems we build or the stories we are taught to believe.

🚪 Final Station: The Truth of an Advanced Civilisation?

Airports are defined by relentless surveillance and rigid control, making the unmonitored restroom stall the perfect place to hide a secret of this magnitude. Here, concealed entirely out of sight, a hidden door leads visitors into the exhibition’s final space: a secret room suspended between a surveillance chamber and an underground archive with an array of control monitors and flickering screens that broadcast a complex web of realities, alternate timelines, and historical fragments. Across these video works, Barminski documents an omnipresent extraterrestrial influence spanning centuries—from the architectural marvels of the pyramids and the ancient stones of Stonehenge to the monolithic statues of Easter Island.

Here, aliens are no longer simply figures of fear or fantasy, but possible forces in the making of human history. Perhaps these extraterrestrial visitors are not invaders, but “old friends” who have accompanied us for millennia—guiding us, quietly shaping the course of civilisation, and perhaps even bestowing upon us the gift of intelligence.

Barminski leaves the answer unresolved. Moving between humour and conspiracy, the installation subverts our deepest cosmic anxieties, replacing the fear of an invasion with the comforting possibility of companionship. The room offers no proof, only the flicker of an idea: that these beings have never been as distant as we thought.

Ultimately, “Runway 51” is less interested in aliens as invaders than as invisible partners who have quietly shaped the human story. Through his cardboard airport, Barminski transforms an everyday site of transit into a space where extraterrestrial life feels at once comic, familiar, and unexpectedly comforting. With the departure gate left wide open, visitors are invited to leave not with certainty, but with wonder. Faced with the unfathomable unknown, who do we choose to become?