GROUP EXHIBITION

One milky dawn, while dreaming, something approaches my paralyzed body, takes my head in both hands, and bites into it as if eating a translucent fruit. In Chanson pour le Nouveau-Monde (Song for the New World, 2021), the narrator recalls a childhood spent on a Caribbean island many years after her father disappeared in Scotland. Miriam Charles layers the incomprehensibility of loss after the experience of losing someone onto a longing for her homeland of Haiti and the suppressed memories of a community. Like a song caught in endless repetition, the work is acutely attuned to the possibility of endings; it watches for them. The camera lingers over nearly motionless scenes—a cemetery, a waterfall, a shoreline, children’s toys scattered on the ground. The emotional density is immense. A persistent sensation hangs over the images: that something incomprehensible has already happened, or is about to happen. The song, sung in the artist’s native language of Kreyòl, seems to cast a spell upon the very condition of the world we inhabit—as though it has always existed, and will always exist, in such a state: one in which a tragedy has already occurred or is perpetually on the verge of occurring. In this way, the artist renders my despair and your disappearance, each individual loss, as fundamentally interconnected.

Seungyeon Yi’s Time Eroded Cliff (2026) resembles a sea cliff shaped through the ceaseless passage of waves and breaking light, through cycles of death and birth. It is a formation carved by salt-laden water, or a place of refuge for living creatures. Laden with multiple layers of metaphor, the cliff becomes an entryway into another temporal realm. The materials that seem to melt and loosen across the wall surface, together with the tangible and intangible layers accumulated within them, evoke an ongoing process of movement and transformation. How many currents of time and change must they pass through? The moment a hand touches the ivory-coloured surface, its contours begin to dissolve. Apparitions of dead life forms drift within the mass, stripped of physical presence, volume, and specificity. If there is one thing the artist believes without doubt, it is that no disappearance is ever entirely complete; nothing vanishes without leaving a trace. That conviction slowly takes shape within the work, dissolving, settling, and accumulating across the surface. Time Eroded Cliff regards time not only as a merciless force that erases life, but also as a mystery that enables life to emerge and grow. Time does not move in a straight line. Instead, it extends in multiple directions, overlapping and folding into itself as it flows.

Encountering Mata¹, the end of the world no longer appears as a singular event but as a fractal—an ending that recurs endlessly at different scales. As a Māori artist living in the aftermath of a “small apocalypse²,” Atarangi Anderson weaves forms of life that emerge after collapse through Te Ao Wairua³—the spiritual realm encompassing the profound and sacred relationships among spirits, ancestors, all living beings, and the cosmos. The diamond-shaped pātiki⁴ motifs embroidered onto aute⁵ cloth symbolise both the abundance of feminine care and the fractal logic of a reality that is never fixed but constantly moving and renewing itself. Made by beating, joining, and thinning sheets of tree bark, the cloth stretches and envelops. Light and cool, it moves through the spaces between things. As the long strips of bark slowly lean toward us, an unfamiliar world begins to diffuse through the air. A pale white tinged with yellow flows quietly into our vision, inviting us to encounter a truth larger than ourselves.

1. In Māori: Eyes that make spiritual perception possible
2. As a Māori Indigenous artist, she argues that, like many Indigenous communities, the Māori have already experienced an apocalypse—that is, the end of nation, land, and culture.
3. In Māori: The spiritual world
4. Derived from the diamond shap–e of the flounder, thi–s motif metaphorically represents women’s care and devotion to the community (iwi) in Māori Indigenous culture. It is a symbol that honors the role of women who, even while men sleep deeply through the night, remain alert to the moment when flounder appear—providing food in the darkness and sustaining life through their labor.
5. In Māori: Polynesian traditional barkcloth
6. For example, the artist shared the following account of her working process: “Since 2020, the aute grove (pā aute) that I have been nurturing and caring for has been the subject of ongoing dispute, as developers have sought to purchase the land for housing construction. After years of legal contention, the case eventually reached the Supreme Court, and this week the garden is being dismantled. They are installing pipelines through the very old trees that form the source of my work.For me, this incident feels like yet another example of how colonial orders—still operating today—continue to obstruct every attempt to reassemble and restore the world. It is truly heartbreaking.” Such experiences invite us to reconsider what it might mean to create abundance and liberation within a world that is already damaged and displaced.

Text. Seunga You