胶囊威尼斯｜廖雯：有一天，我发现自己认识世界的方式是生吞

胶囊威尼斯

CAPSULE VENICE

个展 Solo Show

廖雯：有一天，我发现自己认识世界的方式是生吞?

Liao Wen: By devouring it, I learn about the world?

展期 Dates?

2024.09.21 - 12.15

开幕 Opening

2024.09.21, 16:00 - 19:00?????

地址 Address

意大利威尼斯 Sestiere Dorsoduro 2525号 - 30123

scroll down for English

展览标题出自作家林棹的小说《潮汐图》。书中的主人公是一只巨型青蛙。其奇异的体型使之成为被人们渴望、捕获、收藏和豢养的对象。它的个人历史折射了十九世纪珠江流域被殖民化的历史。廖雯被巨蛙在迁徙游移中，多次的吞噬行为所吸引。吞噬即是了解，从内部掌握其逻辑，与其融为一体。巨蛙时而是猎物，是人们的异域情调和文化意识形态预期的投射对象；时而是捕猎者，它用吞噬来抹杀敌对之人，用反噬来否定自身，用吞咽品尝未知、预知命运。因此，口和与口相关的行为，诸如（字面上和象征性的）吞咽和呕吐，便自然地成为了贯穿展览的意象。

《撒克巴斯的泪水》（2024）描绘了一对雌雄螳螂交配的场景。雌螳螂无助地被本能驱使，不由自主地吞食伴侣。同时，这种不受控制的本能所注定的孤独命运令她哭泣。在这件作品中，口与眼息息相关。眼睛最直接的表现便是雌螳螂的凝视，而眼泪则是对眼睛的间接指涉。阿尔贝托·莫拉维亚 (Alberto Moravia) 在他为乔治·巴塔耶 (George Bataille) 的《眼睛的故事》 (Histoire de l'oeil) 所著的序言中写到：“爱人想要咬、吞噬、谋杀、毁灭爱人，这是一种不可能的沟通和寻求认同的努力。”雌螳螂的背部附有一个新奇的元素：带有娟毛的种子。它们仿佛在欲望中直挺触角，抑或象征着两具身体间短暂共存状态的徒劳延续。作品的标题提示出雌螳螂与撒克巴斯的平行关系（拉丁语中 succuba，意为“爱人”）。撒克巴斯是一种外表雌雄同体的恶魔，传说她会诱惑女性和男性（尤其是修士），使他们屈服于她的意志。廖雯在此似乎指向了作品的另一层含义：对女性性解放的返祖罪恶感的反思。

如果螳螂的性食同类行为可以被视为一种交融，那么《我从口袋里掏出银河》（2024）的主体——一个呈跪姿呕吐的蛇尾人形，再次通过口部将内外连通。在这里，银河是一张网，缀满了各种天然材料残片，从海藻和贝壳，到玻璃珠和金子。逆蠕动的意象是许多创世神话的核心。出世的故事往往是流放的故事，驱逐、撤离的故事。人类被赶出花园，天使被逐出天堂，地狱吐出恶魔，天空、大海或神灵的口中降生了先祖。甚至大爆炸在某种意义上也是一个放逐神话。一方面，蛇的形象（如昆达里尼）常常唤起降世、重生、觉醒的联想。另一方面，脏器内容物暴露在外有违常理，一种幽异感油然而生。

展览中最大型的作品《我吞吐潮汐只为照亮……》（2024）几乎占据了展厅中央的房间，它看似是生物标本，实则是一头鲸鱼的遗骸，骨骼上标有数字编号。在这里，鲸鱼是一个隐喻，暗指所有牺牲在剥削的执念和消灭异端的掌控欲下的生灵。同一展厅中一段行为表演的影像生动地强化了这一主旨。表演者调动这具僵死之躯，将标本变为祭品。渴望占有或研究异域生物的欲念，本质上与意图吞噬享用垂涎之物的欲念并无二致，它驱使表演者最终变成和林棹小说中的殖民者同样贪婪的捕猎者，在传染性的暴力役使下释放出集体的残暴。

《坠入巨人之眼》（2024）探索了通过眼睛实施，抑或对眼睛实施的另类暴力形式。在一连串有关死亡的超现实遐想中，欲望的初始冲动席卷而来。受路易斯·布努埃尔《一条安达鲁狗》(Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bu?uel) 的启发，眼睛作为一种求知的器官，从眼窝演变为各种不同的场景，标志着认知机能从智性到本能，从理性到情色的转变。眼睛作为知识和全视之眼的象征，在许多宗教中是常见的，在这里却穷途末路。人类、动物和植物的躯体被各式工具穿刺侵犯，暴行好似游走于保存与破坏的仪式，而眼睛则是仪典进程中贯穿始终的图腾。

《柔软的剩余物#1-4》（2024）灵感来源于舟翅桐、海椰子、胭木和皇冠花的种子，它们的形状和特质令人联想到身体。作品揭示了这些种子与人体间意料之外、情理之中的亲缘关系。飘落在水泥路面裂缝中无法扎根的行道树的种子触动了艺术家，这些注定无法发芽却尽全力绽开的种子，让她联想到伤口上的溃疡和组织液：在新生与绝望，在愈合与疼痛之间摇摆。种子雕塑充满了生命力，纤巧诱人，但它们悬而未决的状态和似是而非的外表也令人心神不宁。它们具有一种近乎联觉的特质。它们在人类领域与广阔生物圈的中间地带，将剩余物转换为生机，并彰显两者的韧性。

无论是人类还是超人类，廖雯作品的主题始终具有克里斯蒂娃 (Kristeva) 所称的贱斥特质。它们并不等待救赎，而是拥抱自己的不寻常和孤立，使可接受与不可接受之间的边界变得灵活，把经验当作“一次通往人的可能性尽头的航行。”

文：玛瑙（Manuela Lietti)

Liao Wen 廖雯 | Performance of I Swallow the Tide to Light Up… 我吞吐潮汐只为照亮…… 表演现场 | 2024 | Photo by Riccardo Banfi 由Riccardo Banfi拍摄

Capsule Venice is proud to present By devouring it, I learn about the world, Liao Wen’s first solo exhibition in Europe and the core of Capsule Venice’s autumn programme. Featuring a completely new set of works specifically conceived for the occasion, this solo exhibition stems from a year of preparation during which Liao Wen has taken her ongoing research about the body, individual and collective rituals, and ancient and contemporary myths, towards unexplored realms.

In Liao Wen’s practice, the body - experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject - has value per se, for its intrinsic qualities and physiological needs, but at the same time, it exists as a social and cultural artefact, invested and shaped by a mix of internal impulses and external forces and demands. This exhibition unfolds as a total artwork in which each of the individual pieces has an intrinsic ontological value, but also stands in relation to an overarching narrative placing emphasis and making visible the social, cultural and aesthetic mechanisms and paradigms that underlie the nexus of disgust, violence, and erotism as manifested by the body. Liao Wen questions whether there is any possibility of an overturning of paradigms that instantiate these concepts, and whether a common sense of abjection can be understood as the latent and germinal stage of a new way of perceiving.

The title of Liao’s solo exhibition is inspired by the writer Lin Zhao’s novel Tidal Atlas, the protagonist of which is a giant frog. Because of its bizarre size it becomes an object of desire, captured, collected, and trapped by the people it encounters. This frog’s personal history reflects the story of the Pearl River Basin area from the 19th century, a history characterised by colonisation. Liao Wen was attracted by the giant frog's many swallowing behaviors during its migration.  Moving from one place to the other, the frog is propelled by uncontrollable desire and curiosity to swallow some of the things it encounters. Swallowing something corresponds to knowing it, to master its logic from the inside, and to become one with it in a sort of communion. At times, the frog is prey to people’s sense of exoticism, and becomes a projection of their cultural and ideological expectations; at others it is a predator, a hunter killing its quarry, devouring to taste the unknown and foresee its own destiny. It is therefore natural that the mouth and those acts related to the mouth - whether swallowing or vomiting (literally and metaphorically)，- are a recurrent motif of the show.

Tears of the Succubus (2024) portrays a female and a male praying mantis in the act of copulation. The mantis is helplessly driven by her nature and unable to keep from eating her partner, while simultaneously, she weeps over the solitary fate her compulsion engenders. In this work, the mouth bears a strong correlation with the eye; the eye is directly referenced by the female gaze, but also indirectly by her tears. In the words of Alberto Moravia in his preface to George Bataille History of the Eye: “The lover wants to bite, devour, murder, destroy the lover, in an impossible effort of communication and identification.” On the back of the female, an element of novelty is added: seeds sprout, as if they were antennas straightened up by desire, or as a way to prolong, in vain, the transient symbiosis between the two bodies. A parallelism as suggested by the title exists between the mantis and the succubus (from the Latin succuba, “lover”), a demon of androgynous appearance who, according to legend, seduced men (especially monks) and women, to make them subject to her will. Liao Wen, here, seems to point to another layer of meaning: the sense of atavist guilt of a liberated feminine sexuality.

If the mantis stands in for the idea of integration in the form of erotic cannibalism, in The Galaxy Turns My Pocket Inside Out (2024) the subject - a kneeling figure with a serpentine tail - is caught while vomiting; once again combining the inside with the outside via a voracious mouth. The galaxy, literally a net “embroidered” with organic waste of different kinds, seaweed and shells, glass beads and gold are visible. Imagery evoking reverse peristalsis is at the heart of many creation myths. “Emergence stories” are often expulsion stories, banishment stories, evacuations. People are always 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 Big Bang is a kind of expulsion myth. But, if on one hand, a feeling of (re)birth or awakening is evoked by the image of the snake - an image also evocative of the energy activated by the Kundalini serpent - on the other hand, a feeling of unheimlichkeit is conveyed by the visceral interior that, in becoming exteriorised, and, thus, visualised disrupts societal and conventional norms.

The largest piece on view is I Swallow the Tide to Light Up (2024). What resembles a biological specimen occupying the central room of the exhibition hall is in fact a remnant of a whale’s body reduced to a group of numbered bones. Here, the whale is a metaphor for all those - no matter whether human or animal - that are martyred by obsessive exploitation or the annihilation of otherness through desire for control. This theme is reinforced by the video of a performance activating this now-inert body, transforming it into a sacrificial token. Moved by the wish to possess or scientifically analyse what seems an alien creature - in other words, to swallow and consume the object of one’s desires - the performers end by becoming perpetrators of the same voracious greed as the colonisers of Lin Zhao’s novel, releasing a sort of collective brutality at the service of a contagious sense of violence.  

Down the Eye of Polyphemos (2024) explores another type of violence carried out through the eye, but also upon it. What guides the first impulse of desire is caught in a continuous chain of surreal, yet fatal, musings. Inspired by Luis Bu?uel’s Un Chien Andalou, the eye, an organ of the mind that seeks knowledge, shifts from the orbital cavity into different scenarios, indicating a similar transfer of cognitive faculties from the mind to instinct, from rationality to eroticism. The eye as a symbol of knowledge and all-seeingness common to many religions, here is dragged to a dead end; it is embedded in a sort of ritual in which violence is carried out using all sorts of tools that perforate, penetrate, and violate the bodies of humans, animals, and plants, shifting between methods of preservation and corruption.

Liao Wen 廖雯 | Tender Residue #3 柔软的剩余物 #3 | 2024 | hand-carved and painted limewood, 3D printed stainless steel, sawdust and wood glue, copper threads, glass beads, wood beads 手工雕刻及上色椴木，3D 打印不锈钢，木屑和木工胶，铜丝，琉璃珠，木珠 | 76 x 22 x 39 cm

Tender Residue #1-4 (2024) evokes the body through 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 unexpected yet natural proximity of these seeds with the human body. The work is inspired by the idea of “wasted” seeds falling from trees onto cracks in roads and pavements. Although these seeds are destined to fail to germinate, and are unable to take root, they bloom here with all their strength. The artist uses the forms to evoke ulcerated tissue and secretion forming on wounds. The works oscillate between rebirth and despair, healing and pain. Seeds are filled with vigour and energy, seductive, delicate, but at the same time they are disturbing with their unresolved status and appearance. They possess an almost synaesthetic quality. They are examples of the transformation of waste into a different kind of germination, of the in-betweenness of human realms and the wider biosphere and of the resilience of both. 

No matter whether human or extra-human, Liao’s subjects remain abject in Kristevan terms, not waiting to be redeemed, rather completely embracing their status as outcasts, their abnormality, making the borders between the acceptable and unacceptable flexible, in a way such that "experience is a voyage to the end of the possible of man.”

关于艺术家 ABOUT THE ARTIST

胶囊上海当前展览

Current Exhibition at Capsule Shanghai

伊丽莎白·耶格：蔑视????

Elizabeth Jaeger: Contempt

将展出至2024年10月26日

Until October 26, 2024?

展览现场，伊丽莎白·耶格：蔑视，胶囊上海，中国上海；由凌卫政拍摄