An energetic fluidity between species, regimes, materials, and genders courses through WangShui’s film and installation exhibition here, which marks their European debut. Pupating silkworms inhabit an elaborate insect-scale cityscape of chromed bath fixtures in Gardens of Perfect Exposure, 2018. Over the course of the exhibition’s run, the larvae will enact the process of first shedding their skin, then building a cocoon of raw silk, a metamorphosis that will be livestreamed and projected onto the walls of the gallery. It’s a useful metaphor for the exhibition and WangShui’s practice as a whole, which, they note, was “born out of a desire to dematerialize a corporeal identity.”

Though the exhibition takes over the entire ground floor of the gallery, the capacity of its spaces is used sparingly, allowing the works to haunt, rather than occupy, the space. A snakeskin sculpture hangs over a corner of an otherwise empty room, hovering inauspiciously above the doorway. Elsewhere, a ding reminiscent of a game show rings between the rooms, as if signaling transitions on another plane. The sense of having entered in the wake of something seeps into the installations’ architectonics, with one entrance for the mixed-media installation Weak Pearl, 2019, seemingly burst open, with what look like shards of glass and wrenched metal jutting out from the doorframe.

The show’s central piece and its tour de force is a thirteen-minute video, From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances, 2018. In it, pensive drone footage takes us through a complex of high-rises on the South China Sea. Curiously, the buildings are designed with gaping voids at their centers, which, the narrator explains, are a remnant of feng shui principles that were banned by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution and flourished outside of mainland China, especially in Hong Kong. These so-called dragon gates form a locus for other musings on political and personal transformation, and hint toward the nature of the beast we’ve been unwittingly trailing.

— Alison Hugill