Where Jellyfish Come From
Antenna Space, Shanghai 8 January – 20 March
Evolutionary biologists believe that jellyfish preceded the human race and, given their survival of every mass extinction, that they will likely outlive our species as well. As such, they are widely studied as harbingers of evolution and climate change, warriors of the Anthropocene in all its tragic dimensions. This exhibition – taking its inspiration from a fairytale sequence of the animated series Bee and Puppycat (2013–) that imagines the jellyfish’s origin as the result of a fateful parting between a princess and an octopus, who is bequeathed with a gift of her hair after he helps her find her way home – elevates this incessantly nomadic creature to be its central mascot in positing a playful, queer ecology through the work of three artists.
The titular creature appears in a peachcoloured wall mural by Ad Minoliti that snakes its way through the space, a swirling symphony of balls and spherical line. The princess manifests in the acrylic paintings of Liu Yin as a dejected version of Disney’s Snow White, perhaps most moving in Snow White Far Away From Home (2021), which finds our heroine looking forlorn as she gazes out over a seascape, the irises of her eyes turned copper by the sunset; an image of Edenic loss: you can never go home again. The spider – perhaps the jellyfish’s nearest land-based equivalent – dominates a rear corner of the gallery space in the form of a massive pink inflatable by Li Shuang. Though the clear referent here is Louise Bourgeois’s infamous sculpture Mother (1999), Li advised the gallery that the sculpture should only be partially inflated, so that the spider appears hunched over.
All three artists share a cartoonish emo aesthetic that is ultimately more convincing than the overall exhibition concept, for the three approaches are really exercises in self-portraiture via the mechanism of fantasy. This became immediately clear to those who attended the opening, which included a performance by Li that featured more than a dozen performers dressed in one of her classic punkish outfits – pleated Catholic schoolgirl skirt, My Chemical Romance sweatshirt, dark sunglasses, crimson lipstick – some of whom read personal letters in private to friends in attendance that the artist has been estranged from since the onslaught of the virus as a COVID-19 refugee stuck in Europe. One floating princess – or at least her avatar – finally made her way home.