That includes a totally new set of works particularly conceived for the event, this solo exhibition stems from a yr of preparation throughout which Liao Wen has taken her ongoing analysis concerning the physique, particular person and collective rituals, and historical and modern myths, in direction of unexplored realms.

In Liao Wen’s apply, the physique—skilled in its phenomenological primacy by the topic—has worth per se, for its intrinsic qualities and physiological wants, however on the identical time, it exists as a social and cultural artefact, invested and formed by a mixture of inside impulses and exterior forces and calls for. This exhibition unfolds as a complete art work during which every of the person items has an intrinsic ontological worth, but in addition stands in relation to an overarching narrative putting emphasis and making seen the social, cultural and aesthetic mechanisms and paradigms that underlie the nexus of disgust, violence, and erotism as manifested by the physique. Liao Wen questions whether or not there’s any risk of an overturning of paradigms that instantiate these ideas, and whether or not a standard sense of abjection may be understood because the latent and germinal stage of a brand new means of perceiving.

The title of Liao’s solo exhibition is impressed by the author Lin Zhao’s novel Tidal Atlas, the protagonist of which is a huge frog. Due to its weird dimension it turns into an object of want, captured, collected, and trapped by the individuals it encounters. This frog’s private historical past displays the story of the Pearl River Basin space from the nineteenth century, a historical past characterised by colonization. Liao Wen was attracted by the enormous frog’s many swallowing behaviors throughout its migration. Transferring from one place to the opposite, the frog is propelled by uncontrollable want and curiosity to swallow a few of the issues it encounters. Swallowing one thing corresponds to figuring out it, to grasp its logic from the within, and to turn into one with it in a type of communion. At occasions, the frog is prey to individuals’s sense of exoticism, and turns into a projection of their cultural and ideological expectations; at others it’s a predator, a hunter killing its quarry, devouring to style the unknown and foresee its personal future. It’s subsequently pure that the mouth and people acts associated to the mouth—whether or not swallowing or vomiting (actually and metaphorically)—are a recurrent motif of the present.

Tears of the Succubus (2024) portrays a feminine and a male praying mantis within the act of copulation. The mantis is helplessly pushed by her nature and unable to maintain from consuming her companion, whereas concurrently, she weeps over the solitary destiny her compulsion engenders. On this work, the mouth bears a powerful correlation with the attention; the attention is immediately referenced by the feminine gaze, but in addition not directly by her tears. Within the phrases of Alberto Moravia in his preface to George Bataille Historical past of the Eye: “The lover desires to chunk, devour, homicide, destroy the lover, in an inconceivable effort of communication and identification.” On the again of the feminine, a component of novelty is added: seeds sprout, as in the event that they have been antennas straightened up by want, or as a method to extend, in useless, the transient symbiosis between the 2 our bodies. A parallelism as recommended by the title exists between the mantis and the succubus (from the Latin succuba, “lover”), a demon of androgynous look who, in accordance with legend, seduced males (particularly monks) and girls, to make them topic to her will. Liao Wen, right here, appears to level to a different layer of that means: the sense of atavist guilt of a liberated female sexuality.

If the mantis stands in for the thought of integration within the type of erotic cannibalism, in The Galaxy Turns My Pocket Inside Out (2024) the topic—a kneeling determine with a serpentine tail—is caught whereas vomiting; as soon as once more combining the within with the skin through a voracious mouth. The galaxy, actually a web “embroidered” with natural waste of various sorts, seaweed and shells, glass beads and gold are seen. Imagery evoking reverse peristalsis is on the coronary heart of many creation myths. “Emergence tales” are sometimes expulsion tales, banishment tales, evacuations. Persons are at all times getting thrown out of gardens, angels are expelled from heaven, demons regurgitated from hell, ancestors hurled from the sky or ocean or the mouth of some deity. Even the Large Bang is a form of expulsion fable. However, if on one hand, a sense of (re)beginning or awakening is evoked by the picture of the snake—a picture additionally evocative of the vitality activated by the Kundalini serpent—then again, a sense of unheimlichkeit is conveyed by the visceral inside that, in changing into exteriorized, and, thus, visualized disrupts societal and traditional norms.

The most important piece on view is I Swallow the Tide to Mild Up (2024). What resembles a organic specimen occupying the central room of the exhibition corridor is in truth a remnant of a whale’s physique decreased to a gaggle of numbered bones. Right here, the whale is a metaphor for all these—irrespective of whether or not human or animal—which might be martyred by obsessive exploitation or the annihilation of otherness via want for management. This theme is strengthened by the video of a efficiency activating this now-inert physique, reworking it right into a sacrificial token. Moved by the want to possess or scientifically analyze what appears an alien creature—in different phrases, to swallow and eat the article of 1’s needs—the performers finish by changing into perpetrators of the identical voracious greed because the colonizers of Lin Zhao’s novel, releasing a type of collective brutality on the service of a contagious sense of violence.

Down the Eye of Polyphemos (2024) explores one other kind of violence carried out via the attention, but in addition upon it. What guides the primary impulse of want is caught in a steady chain of surreal, but deadly, musings. Impressed by Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, the attention, an organ of the thoughts that seeks data, shifts from the orbital cavity into totally different eventualities, indicating the same switch of cognitive colleges from the thoughts to intuition, from rationality to eroticism. The attention as a logo of information and all-seeingness widespread to many religions, right here is dragged to a useless finish; it’s embedded in a type of ritual during which violence is carried out utilizing all kinds of instruments that perforate, penetrate, and violate the our bodies of people, animals, and vegetation, shifting between strategies of preservation and corruption.

Tender Residue #1-4 (2024) evokes the physique via the inspiration of the shapes and qualities of the seeds of melembu, coco de mer, woolly dyeing rosebay, and crown flower. These sculptures reveal an sudden but pure proximity of those seeds with the human physique. The work is impressed by the thought of “wasted” seeds falling from timber onto cracks in roads and pavements. Though these seeds are destined to fail to germinate, and are unable to take root, they bloom right here with all their energy. The artist makes use of the kinds to evoke ulcerated tissue and secretion forming on wounds. The works oscillate between rebirth and despair, therapeutic and ache. Seeds are crammed with vigour and vitality, seductive, delicate, however on the identical time they’re disturbing with their unresolved standing and look. They possess an nearly synaesthetic high quality. They’re examples of the transformation of waste into a special form of germination, of the in-betweenness of human realms and the broader biosphere and of the resilience of each.

Regardless of whether or not human or extra-human, Liao’s topics stay abject in Kristevan phrases, not ready to be redeemed, relatively fully embracing their standing as outcasts, their abnormality, making the borders between the appropriate and unacceptable versatile, in a means such that “expertise is a voyage to the tip of the attainable of man.”

Curated by
Manuela Lietti

at Capsule Venice
till December 15, 2024