Exhibition Testimony #8: Sapiens at Copeland Gallery
I was standing aimlessly in the middle of Copeland Park, trying to look for Safehouse 2 where a private view was happening. My directions were confounded by this confusing expanse of glossy warehouses barely distinguishable from one another. I swear I’ve walked past the same indoor skatepark three times. We’re in gentrification country. As I scratched my head cluelessly, I discovered a totally different show going on in Copeland Gallery to my right. I can spot a contextual statement on a wall from a mile away. Welcoming this detour, I gave up my search for Safehouse 2 and wandered in.
Sunlight buzzed through the frosted skylight and shone over the cement floor and white walls with a faint hum. I felt cradled in concrete. Apart from a radiantly faced and quiet woman (who I later learned to be one of the two curators, Seulki Yoo) sitting at the entrance desk, not a single soul was around. Few things match the serenity of having a gallery all to yourself; as if history stops its marching just for you. The complete absence of people, I learned from Seulki, was because today they were taking press shots of the show. I was encouraged to come back tomorrow if I wanted to be around people and alcohol. Sold to the highest drinker!
Cut to 24 hours later and this empty warehouse is suddenly teeming with people – a lot of whom wore beanies and corduroy. It was a sedate and friendly crowd, if not a bit cliquey, but I felt welcome nonetheless. Finishing the curatorial pair, I met Soyeon Park who towered over almost everyone in the room. When I saw the exhibition’s name, Sapiens, I was reminded of Yuval Noah Harari’s book and a shiver went down my spine. You see, I have a whole catacomb of bones to pick with that book (watery thin bibliography, a very deterministic and narrow stance on history, and is Eurocentric to a kiss ass-y extent…) which I won’t get into now even though I just got into them now. There are certainly some beautiful passages describing how humanity propagated and settled around the world throughout our evolution. But there’s an awful lot of white folk in a book that claims to be a brief history of humankind. This show cleansed the bad taste the book had left in my mouth.
Another riveting section in the book is Harari describing how most of our societal concepts are constructs we’ve cooked up in our heads. Nationhood, human rights, the stock market, train timetables, recipes, etiquettes, and almost every guiding pillar of the modern world owes its existence to the collective imagination of humanity. Ideas spreading across huge populations like wildfire until they become as invisibly tangible as gravity.
But the show’s spiritual role model isn’t Harari. The writings and poetry of Heewon Seo, a Ph.D. researcher in anthropological philosophy, are found all throughout the exhibition; gently breathing rather than brutally belching context into the artworks. A huge white sheet drapes down from the ceiling to the floor, like a message from the sky, telling the first myth of the sapiens. In this poem Heewon ensnared my head in the paradox of whether god created humanity in their image or humanity created god in theirs. And aren’t religions simply beautifully elaborate narratives that seek to answer what the hell we’re actually doing here? We organise and unify ourselves through the tales and ballads we make out of the world around us. All this springs forth from a long tradition of story-telling and myth-making.
Yet there was an otherworldliness to the stories being told in this show. It felt like discovering cave drawing of a lost civilisation rendered in neon and crude oil rather than pigments.
I was pulled toward a cacophony of colour near the back of the gallery. Through seven pieces spread across a corner wall, I witnessed a scene so bizarre that I felt like my senses were mutinying. A battle was raging high above the clouds where only the most treacherous and forbidden peaks poked through. The combatants in this fight were creatures that looked like a crossbreed between ancient Korean mythology and psychedelic drugs. Neon dragons with many heads, giant winged tortoises, snakes with the translucency of jellyfish, flying squid, and all manner of other bugs and beasts with proportions they ought not to have. I was equal parts transfixed and terrified by Yewon Lee’s artworks.
These works represent a very sudden shift in Yewon’s practice where she’s honed in on a host of classical and contemporary influences, using them to refine her playfully wholesome scribblings into sublime forms.
Like floating stones upon which to balance myself, my eyes tip-toed from one detail to the next until I realised that war wasn’t the only thing going on here. Many of these chimeras were simply existing, watching the pandemonium - like me - from a safe distance. Monkeys riding on the backs of tigers, hairy humans sliding gleefully down the curling length of snakes, amphibious-reptilian-humanoids jumping between peaks. No organism is one definable animal; everything is a hybrid. One can’t help but see in them the continually shifting nature of all things.
Rendered in ink and pastel, her creatures explode like fireworks against the dense sky she’s layered with hanji paper. Her wispy collaging creates tangible depth; as if just beyond this thick wall of clouds, the scene continues eternally with ever-increasing weirdness. Thus, what we’re seeing right now is the present moment, accumulated into existence by the flux of the past. Folklore that’s been passed from one ear to the next, down innumerable generations to produce hybrid creatures whose bizarre anatomy represents the passage of history. One can only wonder what these beings will continue to morph and mutate into beyond the impenetrable clouds of the future.
Gazing at Amy Gilles’ works across a long wall in the gallery, I felt the sensation of freefall through a cascade of random words, numbers, and images. Like staring into the eyes of an electric world through a cracked kaleidoscope. Every waking moment we’re subjected to a ruthless bombardment of ads, signs, safety warnings, timetables, directions, alerts, and every manner of stale text that scatters off our brains like cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Not even in our dreams can we get away. Look to your surroundings and you’ll find no absence of text; because we use language to make the material world communicate with us just as we communicate with each other. And naturally, through sheer stupid quantity, we’ve become so desensitized to these messages that they evade our awareness unless we actively go looking for them. But every now and again you’ll look up from whatever you’re doing and catch a glimpse of a street sign or a shop front and for some alien reason it’ll catch your attention in a way it never has before. You’re caught off guard by why it’s suddenly making you chuckle or feel uncomfortable. Needless to say, words are as alive as the beings that uttered or wrote them.
Criss-crossed by the visual and textual, Amy’s practice seeks to find the innocuous poetry that exists in the mundane. The artefacts on wall seem like salvage collected and cleaned in the aftermath of some natural disaster. Or random crap swiped from the streets on a night out. Signs bearing messages such as “No Parking” or “Ensure Adequate Ventilation” or “Contains no acid”. Cyclone Paint Remover makes a few appearances. The suburbs of New Eltham seem to play some significance for her as most of these items mention the place by name. It won’t take long, however, for you to realise these aren’t found objects at all. This initial impression is a testament to her precision with the various mediums she’s used to reproduce these signs. Especially the way she captures typographical intricacies with embroidery.
Amy’s tender and pain-staking reproduction of these mass-produced and disposable objects is an empathetic inversion of purpose that helps to bring out entire world encased within these words. That’s how these seemingly plain and vanilla texts mean only one thing, absolutely nothing, and a different thing to every person who reads them. Among such precious detritus are also messages like “Our words are locusts” or “A Gathering Place for Collapse” or “Desire haunts every silence”. It’s as if those signs have suddenly transmuted into something that calls you out with direct eye contact.
More than anything, these feel like the remains of some lost civilisation that carried out marketing with the zeal of warfare. And for a singular unsettling moment, I felt like I was in a museum where we’re the exhibits. Hopefully the organisms gazing at our taxidermized remains and lurid artefacts find us a charming cautionary tale…
For the record I’d like to state that I don’t like video works. It’s a flaw in my own design rather than in the art itself. I just don’t have the temperament to sit through them. I realise publicly admitting this as an art writer is two steps away from professional suicide… but whatever.
Despite my aversion, I was held spellbound by the two films that occupied opposite extremes of dreamlike imagery. Where Wenhui Jiang’s Act Heterosex is a lurid fever dream, Agnete Morell and Samuel Domínguez’s Sentient Gaze induces foreboding sleep paralysis.
In a 2023 interview with Al-Tiba9, Wenhui Jiang expressed a desire to “further explore the media of gamification and film.” Act Heterosex, I think, is the product of this desire. The film is a gameplay of something that resembles LSD: Dream Simulator[1], except the player is dropped in heterosexual purgatory where the aim of the game is to pass off straightness. Having grown up during the one-child era of China, her delirious creation explores the blossoming of queer narratives in the midst of such cultural constriction. Since female infanticide took a sharp rise during this period, one can only begin to imagine the familial stigma around queerness. The game’s visuals are an information overload that match the insanity of enforced heteronormativity. As the player walks around the game, a flat façade, it soon becomes clear that beyond the boundary there’s nothing. Just an endless pink expanse into which the game world disappears if you move too far outside of it. Fear of the void engulfs you. Suddenly, this stage upon which the player has been performing heterosexuality seems puny and insignificant amidst this ideological infinity.
Heewon Seo succinctly writes in melodic accompaniment to this film, “Narrative is never aware of what lies outside itself – for it always exists within narrative. Sapiens, grown accustomed to narrative, become either lazy or afraid.” Traditional family values are - once again according to the human propensity to organise itself through collective imaginaries - also simply narratives. So is bigotry, sexism, queerphobia, and just about every other questionable belief that’s on the wrong side of history. Folks so entrenched in this thinking fear anything beyond its narrow confines; like the yawning pink abyss past the game’s boundary.
The vibes in the other room are very different however. Agnete Morell and Samuel Domínguez’s film features sedate shots of a drone flying over and surveying a featureless landscape. What does its camera see? There’s menace in its movements, malice in its lens. We see nothing noteworthy in the homogenous blue world below, but can we say the same about the drone? Through unmanned aerial vehicles we’ve sanitised killing; no longer do we get our hands dirty. Their cold eyes seek only heat signatures to snuff out. And now that AI laces their retinas, their gaze requires little to no human intervention. I’ve written at length about the camera’s trauma; a helpless eye that can longer claim neutrality. By enforcing our perspective through the view-finder, we – willingly or not – distort the reality we capture. Now imagine the magnitude of distortion enacted by an AI that also has the tendency to hallucinate off its own slop. I left the tenebrous room feeling rattled, trapped in the bitter knowledge that not even being indoors kept me out of sight of the swarm of eyes in orbit.
Both these films in their own way reckon with humanity’s relationship with technology. Grappling with cultural issues through a game engine, Wenhui’s work represents a two-way relationship where technology develops alongside us to become the medium that’s simultaneously the message. Conversely, Agnete Morell and Samuel Domínguez focus on our destructive reliance on this stuff. Dissatisfied with creating our own gods, we had to go ahead and create subordinates that would eventually usurp us in the same way we’ve dethroned our own deities.
Nothing is ever totally lost to history. Even when thoughts or practices may fall out of a population, some relic of it will remain in the dusty recesses of someone’s mind. Even in the event of this person’s death, some external trace of their ways may remain. A faint ember smouldering away in the dark, waiting for a gentle breath to reawaken its fire. Jiayi Chen’s installation is a temple built in honour of something clawed back from the rapacious hands of time.
On the wall is a large photograph of the artist with her arms held out; her skin covered in a script I’ve never seen before. It’s the same characters repeated all over, three curving lines in a row intersecting each other. This symbol, like a rune, has the beautiful simplicity of how a child might draw a flock of birds as curving Vs. Similar photographs, this time printed on a thin mesh, hung from the ceiling. Also suspended was log of mossy wood from which a chain of thin paper hung like tassels. On the floor was a broken mirror and a hand fan. All of these objects were covered in that same character, flowing across the installation like aerial ballet.
I spotted Jiayi fluttering around the gallery in a long dress of steely silver. When her trajectory coasted past, I asked her for an explanation behind this symbol that refused to leave my mind’s eye. With friendly excitability she told me the character means “women” in the Nüshu script. The name itself translates to “female script” and is the world’s only writing system cultivated and practiced by women. Rejecting the harsh blockiness of traditional Chinese characters, this gracefully silky writing system arose among the rural women living along the Xiao River. They’d get together and sing while sewing; embroidering these threadlike signs into the clothing. Their communal bonds were as strong as the stitching with which they held the fabric of their homes together.
Jiayi led me towards a plinth on which sheets of paper were accompanied with two roller stamps and a pad of ink. With her silent encouragement I imbued the stamp with ink and rolled out a neat row of Nüshu across the page. It was the same word, “women”. The reverberation of this symbol across every surface of the work keeps the practice of Nüshu alive. This obscure tradition that’s gone unnoticed for so long is - thanks to Jiayi’s work - now known by that many more people who came to this show. They may not adopt its practices completely, or at all… but they’re aware now. This further proves the rich tapestry of female sacraments that go ignored by the male writers of history. And each additional mind that learns of its existence tips the balance towards a better collective understanding. That not only an alternative can exist, but has existed for so long.
Before I went to give my praise to the curators Soyeon and Seulki, Jiayi took my notebook and painted some Nüshu characters upon its pages. Apart for the word for “women”, I couldn’t understand the other two. Leaving me with something to remember this newly acquired knowledge, she sauntered off to her partner. I’m still to this day trying to decipher the meaning of the other two words.
It's been about two months since my visit and the world feels totally different now. A tremendous chill has descended as we’ve finally locked eyes with winter. I’m grateful for the many things in my heart that keep me warm; the voluptuous love of friends new and old, the head-splitting volume of the music currently exploding out of my speakers, the halo around the moon cast by its regal light… to name a couple. Among them is this photograph on Instagram of the artists and curators of the show posing for a celebratory picture. Laughing faces all round. They all seem proud of what they’ve created. Soyeon and Seulki’s compassionate curation and Heewon Seo’s tender writings have unified such diverse disciplines under a single harmonic question; what are we? The show takes you aback to remind you the state of affairs humanity has contrived. But more than that, it shows you the boundless abyss of possibility that exists outside our narrative and the way it’s unfolded so far. And it need not be a possibility that’s out of our control, for each and every one of us – when it comes down to it – holds their own pen.
[1] A bizarre video game released for the PlayStation that’s now a cult classic. Google it.
