A Review by Saito Tsutomu Originally published in Japanese on note.com
Translated from Japanese with cultural context annotations
In early May, I visited the large-scale solo exhibition “Liminal” by Pierre Huyghe at Punta della Dogana in Venice. Here, I’d like to record my observations from viewing this exhibition.
Pierre Huyghe states that an exhibition marks a beginning. Unlike most artists who complete their work before opening day, his approach is fundamentally different.
“Usually, artists think of exhibitions as endpoints or solutions. Artists work in studios, there’s a process, and at the end of that process, they present their work in what’s called an exhibition. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in exhibitions not being the end of a process, but a starting point to go somewhere else.”
Source: Art21 (accessed June 4, 2024)
In other words, Huyghe’s works are not fixed when an exhibition begins—they continue to change throughout the exhibition period. The impression varies depending on when you visit, and even if the displayed works remain unchanged, the exhibition itself, including the viewers, continues to evolve.
I believe Huyghe presents the very process of transformation over time. This exhibition will travel to Korea in 2025, but it will undoubtedly be a different exhibition from the one in Venice. This was precisely why I traveled to Italy to see it.
Mise-en-scène: The Theater of Meaning
One key concept for understanding Huyghe’s work is mise-en-scène (French: staging). This theatrical and cinematic term refers to the arrangement of actors and props on stage. Huyghe conducts exhaustive research that astounds those around him. He meticulously plans scenarios and positions his “actors,” but nobody—including the artist himself—knows what the outcome will be. We can only observe. He presents complex propositions from the inside out.
I wonder if he anticipates a scenario here—this is something I’d like to ask him if I ever have the chance to interview him.
“Liminal” is based on François Pinault’s collection. Bernard Arnault of LVMH also extensively collects Huyghe’s works. While businesspeople collect challenging contemporary art for various reasons, I believe one motivation is that these works provide not just visual but intellectual leaps.
Contemporary art serves as an amplification device for both emotion and critical awareness.
Source: Shukan Toyo Keizai [Weekly Oriental Economist], vol. [volume number], no. [issue number], February 20, 2021.
The Exhibition Experience
Tickets are sold online with time slots (though same-day purchases at the box office seemed possible). The queue wasn’t overwhelming, though weekends might be busier. About five people were waiting before opening that day.
The exhibition displays works in nine rooms (or sections). After passing reception, the first room is darkened, and since the entire venue is generally dark, there’s a notice advising visitors to let their eyes adjust. Having downloaded the floor plan and brief work descriptions from the exhibition website, I knew the first room contained the video work Liminal.
On a large screen, a faceless naked woman performs gestures. In the faint screen light, with uncertain footing, concrete blocks are placed around—these too are part of the work, and some visitors stumbled over them. The extreme darkness led some to use phone flashlights, prompting guards to call out “no flash.” The giant screen woman repeats gestures, and while we try to extract meaning from them, this is a cerebral exercise—we’re caught in Huyghe’s trap.
The screen seemed to show emergency exit lights (?) glowing through from behind, appearing like a starry sky. Behind the screen is Portal—antennas relay information.
The large floor-to-ceiling screen displays a woman whose face (extending to the back of her head) is hollow. Initially appearing as if her face were painted black, when she turns sideways, you see that her nose and cheek areas are empty voids through which the background is visible. Not painted black, but simply not there.
Cultural Context: The hollow face reminded me of Black Hole, a demon character from Kinnikuman, a popular Japanese manga series. This association highlights how Japanese viewers bring specific cultural references to international contemporary art.
The absence of a face suggests identity deprivation. When a person’s primary identity markers are stripped away, we seek more information from hand movements and gestures. Though robot-like, we sense more life perhaps because of the nudity.
Human Mask: Post-Fukushima Commentary
Behind Liminal is Human Mask, displayed on a large screen in a loop, with benches for seating.
Cultural Context: This work is set in Fukushima’s no-entry zone following the 2011 nuclear disaster—an area that remains largely uninhabitable due to radiation. The markings on building walls are official designations from the evacuation process.
A masked monkey in a dress moves through an empty izakaya (Japanese-style pub). It performs actions like bringing hand towels to tables and carrying sake bottles—programmed movements that appear touching in the empty space, yet reveal something more sinister about ownership of others.
Cultural Context: Izakaya are quintessentially Japanese social spaces—informal pubs where colleagues gather after work. The sight of a monkey performing service roles carries particular cultural weight in Japan, where traditional monkey performance (saru mawashi) has complex historical associations with entertainment and, more problematically, with power dynamics and exploitation.
While watching Human Mask, I noticed about five white visitors beside me wearing receivers with dim blue LEDs, seemingly for audio guides. But I wondered—were those really interpretive devices?
As someone raised in Japan watching this footage of Fukushima, an izakaya, and monkey performance, I possess cultural codes for understanding. However, I imagine those receiver-wearing viewers lack this context. In different cultural spheres, this might be interpreted as animal abuse. I addressed this cultural translation issue in a subsequent note. Huyghe incorporates translation itself into his work.
Liminal shows a faceless naked human. Human Mask presents a human-faced (masked) dressed monkey. This reversal phenomenon. Recognizing this point led me to move back and forth between rooms to view each work—reminiscent of the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux (The Immaterials). Those receivers also evoked philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s vision of the coming world presented at that time.
Living Systems and Temporal Flows
Meanwhile, Idiom appears—wearing a golden mask, speaking AI-generated voices while moving through the venue, standing still, or sitting. You can’t hear the voice without approaching, intentionally changing viewers’ positions.
Interpretations deepen as I move back and forth, falling deeper into complexity. And I’ve only seen two rooms.
The next room displays Zoodram and multiple aquariums. Hermit crabs inhabit replicas of Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse, with other organisms in the tanks. Floating rocks seemed to move via water currents.
Cultural Context: Constantin Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse is a landmark of modernist sculpture, representing the essence of form reduced to its purest state. Using it as hermit crab housing creates a provocative dialogue between high art and natural habitat needs.
Hermit crabs can move underwater and remain submerged indefinitely. Having mostly seen them moving on land in videos, watching them permanently underwater made me wonder about breathing. This revealed the limitations of my hermit crab knowledge. Though the tank tops were open, they seemed unlikely to swim up there.
Pump-generated water flow creates directional currents in the tanks. Floating rocks had collected in corners, but when I returned from viewing other rooms, they’d moved to the tank center. Slowly flowing back to their corner positions via pump currents.
Whether viewer mischief, artist instruction, or Idiom‘s intervention—unclear, but the floating rocks visualized flow and made water currents visible. I also learned hermit crabs move around considerably.
Huyghe shows us human and non-human, fiction and fact. Fiction becoming fact, supposedly factual things possibly being fabrications. Not exposing this, but allowing viewers to realize it themselves.
Rocks shouldn’t float—overturning such assumptions through direct demonstration. Massive rocks float in giant tanks while primitive shrimp-like crab-like creatures swim in sand layers below.
Because rocks float now, we assume they’ll continue floating—linear continuity thinking. But this presents a delicate balance within the tank’s environment. In such precarious conditions, do viewers perceive danger for creatures swimming beneath potentially sinking rocks?
This delicate floating balance reflects our planetary environment’s condition. How does this world exist for living and non-living beings?
Deep Time and Mechanical Persistence
The large room presents Camata on a massive, brightly-lit screen. This work clearly extends Cerro Indio Muerto.
In the desert, robotic arms rearrange glass spheres around discovered skeletal remains. Rail-mounted cameras circle, capturing every detail. Naturally, skeletons don’t move—only machines including robotic arms operate. Machines sit directly on ground; their power and control systems remain mysterious. The endless footage and mechanical operations inevitably make us perceive time.
Nothing moving in this video relates to temporal passage. Even skeletons exist outside time. Dry deserts presumably don’t decompose bone, leaving no time-conscious entities present.
Programs operate via temporal control (CPU clocks = timing), but this differs from human time perception. Can we continue watching this footage? It seemed to question this. During hours of viewing, audiences departed quickly.
Consciousness and Translation
After viewing second-floor works, I see UUmwelt-Annlee. The guide suggests this viewing order, though actual sequence probably doesn’t matter. Works seen in one room advance or change interpretations of works in other rooms through this back-and-forth movement.
Umwelt originally involved releasing spiders and ants into galleries. From Uexküll’s writings, translated as “environment-world” in Japanese (Cultural Context: Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt is fundamental to biosemiotics and ecology, describing each organism’s subjective perceptual world). Becoming spiders, becoming ants—utterly impossible. This demonstrates how external observations of others’ characteristics remain ultimately arrogant interpretations.
Years later, adding the negating prefix “U-” to create UUmwelt. Through sensor technology development, might we share consciousness without language? The 2018 Serpentine Gallery UUmwelt incorporated feedback from fly and viewer movements, generating CGI. Flies’ short lifecycles meant multiple generations during the exhibition period.
Brain waves generate images—research from Japan’s Kamitani Laboratory in cognitive neuroscience. Using fMRI to measure brain waves while viewing figures, inputting into machine learning systems. Measuring brain waves during the same subject’s dreams to reconstruct dream content. These results integrate into Huyghe’s work.
Cultural Context: The Kamitani Lab at Kyoto University has pioneered techniques for “reading” visual experiences directly from brain activity, representing cutting-edge Japanese neuroscience that Huyghe incorporates into his artistic practice.
The work title connects to AnnLee—a supporting character Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased from an anime production company in Akihabara (Cultural Context: Akihabara is Tokyo’s electronics and anime/manga district, where such character transactions occur within Japan’s complex intellectual property market). Intended for various productions but facing disposal due to circumstances. Artists needed to rescue her from capitalism. As a supporting character, she possessed only appearance and name—an empty shell. “No Ghost Just a Shell” shared AnnLee with contemporary artists, each creating her substance. This project name references Ghost in the Shell (Cultural Context: Masamune Shirow’s influential cyberpunk manga exploring consciousness, identity, and the boundary between human and artificial intelligence—themes central to Huyghe’s practice).
Mind’s Eyes shows viewers CGI generation in real-time. Black dots appear eye-like. Standing nearby, watching flash-like changing imagery induced vertigo. As if my body (or boundaries) were dissolving—generated imagery reconstructs what brains see through machine learning from human brain wave samples. Whether my brain functions similarly remains unknown, but perhaps fundamental consciousness intervention occurs.
Conclusion
I wrote this text as exhibition impressions. I intend to add deeper analysis in different contexts and venues.
Epilogue: Seoul Traveling Exhibition
Several months later, I traveled to Seoul to witness how “Liminal” had transformed in its Korean iteration at Leeum Museum of Art. True to Huyghe’s assertion that exhibitions mark beginnings rather than endings, the works had indeed evolved.
Technological Evolution: The most striking change was in Liminal itself. What I had initially perceived as motion capture footage in Venice now clearly revealed itself as AI-generated imagery in Seoul. The faceless woman’s movements appeared more overtly artificial, suggesting either technical adjustments or the natural progression of the work’s generative systems. The exhibition description noted “real-time simulation,” though the exact parameters of this simulation remained characteristically opaque—typical of Huyghe’s reluctance to provide overly explanatory context.
Spatial Reconfigurations: While reduced in scale, the Seoul presentation offered new juxtapositions. Most significantly, Liminal (the faceless human) and Human Mask (the human-faced monkey) were installed back-to-back, creating an ironic dialogue that transcended mere reversal to suggest deeper questions about identity, authenticity, and performance.
Works marked “on-going” in their creation dates proved their temporal nature: Camata had evolved its machine learning algorithms, with robotic arms rearranging glass spheres in new patterns. The “self-editing” video component reflected these algorithmic developments, demonstrating how Huyghe’s works exist in constant states of becoming.
Cultural Translation in Practice: Experiencing the same works in different cultural contexts illuminated Huyghe’s interest in translation as transformation. Korean audiences brought different referential frameworks to pieces like Human Mask, while Seoul’s vibrant contemporary art scene provided a different contextual backdrop for understanding Huyghe’s technological interventions.
Curatorial Adaptations: Practical adjustments—guards with flashlights illuminating pathways, printed maps indicating Idiom‘s locations—reflected operational necessities while arguably diminishing some of the work’s intentional disorientation. These compromises highlighted the tension between Huyghe’s conceptual ambitions and exhibition realities.
The Seoul iteration confirmed Huyghe’s fundamental premise: that exhibitions are not fixed presentations but evolving ecosystems. Each viewing context—geographic, cultural, temporal—generates new meanings and relationships. The work’s journey from Venice to Seoul exemplified the artist’s interest in systems that change over time, incorporating chance, technological evolution, and cultural translation into their very structure.
This traveling exhibition experience reinforced my understanding of Huyghe’s practice as fundamentally concerned with time, change, and the impossibility of fixed meaning—concepts that resonate differently but powerfully across cultural boundaries.
About the Author:
Saito Tsutomu brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to contemporary art criticism, combining over 20 years of consulting experience spanning technology, business strategy, and organizational transformation. His career encompasses software engineering, systems consulting, and strategic business advisory work, providing him with deep insights into both the technical infrastructure and institutional frameworks that shape contemporary art practice.
He completed an MFA from a graduate program for working professionals in March 2021, with his master’s thesis focusing specifically on Pierre Huyghe’s practice. Currently working in strategic and technology consulting with expertise in emerging AI applications and business transformation, Saito brings analytical rigor from both corporate strategy and academic art research to his criticism.
This distinctive combination of technical expertise, strategic business acumen, and theoretical art knowledge enables him to decode the complex systems—both artistic and institutional—that define much of today’s technologically-mediated and globally-networked contemporary art world.
Translator’s Note: This review offers a uniquely Japanese perspective on Huyghe’s work, particularly valuable for its cultural readings of pieces like “Human Mask” within post-Fukushima contexts and references to Japanese popular culture, neuroscience research, and philosophical concepts that international audiences might miss. Saito’s background as both a business consultant and art researcher provides a distinctive lens for understanding Huyghe’s complex conceptual frameworks. The author’s experience of cultural translation—both literal and metaphorical—mirrors Huyghe’s own interest in how meaning transforms across different contexts and viewing positions. The Seoul epilogue further demonstrates how Huyghe’s works evolve across different cultural and temporal contexts, validating his conception of exhibitions as beginnings rather than endpoints.