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 Buñuel’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.
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.”
Text: Manuela Lietti
