HOW Art Museum is pleased to announce that Shapeshifter, solo exhibition of artist Ce JIAN, will be on view from May 18, 2025.
Ce JIAN’s solo exhibition Shapeshifter takes “shapeshift” as the core proposition. Through interdisciplinary research methods based on natural history, Chinese and Western mythology, industrial manufacturing, digital technology and other fields, she constructed four series of works into an organic life system from material body to spatial virtual fantasy with flexible and logical painting language; it explores the natural transformation of the power relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, entity and virtual under the de-humanized picture. The “shapeshift” here is not only a formal alienation, but also an open reorganization of content and a reconstruction of cognitive framework.
Ce JIAN’s Solo Exhibition: Shapeshifter
Human exploration of shapeshifting initially stemmed from the examination of our own limitations, and later evolved the advance of technology and imagination since the Industrial Revolution. Whilst the classic novel such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses engaged bodily shape-shifting between gods and humans, the modern shape-shifting such as Ghost In The Shell, deals with human-machine integration, but both share the same desire of transcending the biological self. With this in mind, artist Ce Jian’s solo exhibition Shapeshifter breaks away from anthropocentric cognitive limits and delves into the theme of shape-shifting from a perspective of fluidity rather than transcendence.
In her Armada series, Ce Jian draws inspiration from the “dazzle painting” technique invented by the British navy during the World War I. This method, which used abstract geometric painting to camouflage and transform physical objects, is reinterpreted in Jian’s work. What initially appear as randomly arranged color blocks on the canvas rise into three-dimensional illusions when viewing from different angles. The seemingly stable spatial perceptions suddenly shift to wobbly. These virtual bodies, transformed through visual flow on a two-dimensional plane, represent a form of reverse colonization of the three-dimensional by the two-dimensional. They articulate the first layer of “shapeshifting” in this exhibition, while also embodying Ce Jian’s core artistic inquiry: painting is both a material entity and a complex visual language capable of reconstructing physical space.
The Sentinel series breaks away from the single-point perspective of the renaissance tradition and merges with cutting-edge game-based VR technology. These uncanny and supernatural humanoid machines compel the viewer to move continuously through the exhibition space in search of the “correct” viewing angle. The bodily engagements make the act of viewing itself an integral part of the artwork. As the viewers shift their bodies to capture the complete image, they also undergo a “shape-shifting” , from passive observers to active participants.
Philosopher Donna Haraway, in her groundbreaking essay A Cyborg Manifesto, proposed a vision of human-machine coexistence. This hybrid subjectivity, transcending technology, species, and virtuality, challenges power structures and conventional identity categories. In Jian’s Species and Sphinx series, a similar empirical approach deconstructs the fundamental opposition between the mechanical and the biological. Her portrait-like figures are not just machines, but speculative models of new species. Jian draws references from drawings of both real and mythical creatures in natural historical books, and the outcomes are some hybrid bodies of both organic and synthetic characters. They are not merely cyborgs, but organisms that seem to exist in a continuum between the past and the future. At once fearsome and eerily alluring, they wait to be discovered in their downy habitats.
Through interdisciplinary approaches to natural history, mythology from both East and West, industrial production, and digital technology, the four distinct series in the exhibition illustrate Jian’s central idea on Shapeshifting. She employs a flexible and also logical visual language to construct an organic life system that spans from material bodies to spatial virtual fantasies. The shapeshifter she creates is not a mechanical extension of the human body, but adaptive mutations of the environmental evolution. They possess their own agency and systematic discipline, rejecting both anthropocentrism and binary thinking. The exhibition explores the natural shift in power dynamics between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces, between the physical and the virtual. Here, shapeshifting is not merely a formal alienation, but an open-ended reconfiguration of content and a reconstruction of cognitive frameworks.
Curator: Zheng Guo