2020.11.07 – 2021.01.02
Breathing Through Skin

Bringing together new and recent works—several of which have been especially conceived for this occasion—“Breathing Through Skin” highlights four artists and their critical invocations of monstros-ity—the monster as constructed motif in horror and the monstrous as an inherent wildness intrinsic to desire. Together, these works traverse a range of binaries, provoking an erotic and affective engage-ment with bodies in the world, beyond the trappings of monstrified difference.
The monstrous body is always a construct and a projection, bearing the traces of historically specific othering processes. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the quintessential modern vampire novel, the eponymous Count Dracula embodies an eclectic range of traits—race, class, gender, sexuality, nation-ality—all of which were deemed threatening to British national identity at the time by and within fic-tional texts, sexual science, and psychopathology. Whereas Dracula incarnated the phobias of the Vic-torian era, contemporary vampires like those in the Vampire Chronicles and Twilight series are no longer monstrous or even particularly distant from hegemonic identity: they are white, monogamous, purely aesthetic creatures (and oftentimes collectors). This latter-day fantasy of the vampire entails an act of far greater violence than its 19th-century Gothic predecessors: the total erasure of otherness from representation. Meanwhile in reality, through advanced biotechnologies, the monstrification and erasure of certain bodies has evidently continued, if not intensified, becoming ever stealthier.
Jack Halberstam relates the popular consumption of horror to the genre’s defining affective structure: “[The] monster inspires fear and desire at the same time: fear of and desire for the other, fear of and desire for the possibly latent perversity lurking within readers and audiences themselves.”[1] The en-twined feelings of dread and want that operate within horror not only make it a particularly productive genre for appropriation, but also reveal the ambivalent, unruly, sometimes ‘perverted’ dimension of desire.
In this exhibition Yong Xiang Li and Pedro Neves Marques contribute new narrative works to the monster canon, appropriating the technologies of monster-making to destabilize and challenge a range of deep-rooted epistemological binaries: us and others, male and female, human and non-human. Meanwhile, interested in abjection and perversion, Mire Lee and Issy Wood present moody, sensuous works that channel a sense of vital eroticism.
The exhibition is curated by Alvin Li
[1] Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Duke University Press: 1995, P13
Installation Views
Artworks
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Bench (nothing is forgotten under the moon)
Yong Xiang Li
Mdf
250(L) x 86(W) x 60(H) cm
2020作品信息Information -
The hike, a giant dog
Yong Xiang Li
Oil and acrylic on gessoed panel
120 x 100 cm
2020作品信息Information -
The hike, a giant
Yong Xiang Li
Oil and acrylic on gessoed panel
120 x 100 cm
2020作品信息Information -
A Mordida (The Bite)
Pedro Neves Marques, HAUT
Double-channel film installation
Video still
20 min
2018作品信息Information -
Untitled (small world)
Issy Wood
Oil on linen
20 x 30 x 2 cm
2020作品信息Information -
Unless you try
Issy Wood
Oil on velvet
100 x 100 x 5 cm
2020作品信息Information -
Europe! Fantasy!
Issy Wood
Oil on linen
140.5 x 100.5 x 4.5 cm
2020作品信息Information -
Study for ‘ass midgets’
Issy Wood
Oil on linen
30 x 24 x 2 cm
2020作品信息Information -
Untitled (higher education)
Issy Wood
Oil on linen
30 x 30 x 2 cm
2020作品信息Information -
Doors
Yong Xiang Li
Oil and acrylic on gessoed panel, Mdf, Pine
260 x 160 x 50 cm
2020作品信息Information -
I’m not in love (how to feed on humans)
Yong Xiang Li
Single-channel video
Video still
27 min作品信息Information -
Carriers, horizontal forms
Mire Lee
Plaster, resin, silicone, pvc hoses, fabric, electronic motors, motor circuit
140.5 x 100.5 x 4.5 cm
2020作品信息Information