AI creatures, faceless masks: French artist questions what it means to be human in new exhibition

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AI creatures, faceless masks: French artist questions what it means to be human in new exhibition

Published: 26 Feb. 2025, 13:48 Updated: 26 Feb. 2025, 14:39

SHIN MIN-HEE
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Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

A still from ″Liminal″ (2024-) by Pierre Huyghe [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

A woman stripped naked walks around alone in a dark limbo-like void, but she has no face. The identity or any information regarding the human, or creature, is not given — only the name of the artwork, known as "Liminal" (2024). Over the next four months, the being in the piece will evolve and soon acquire a voice.

"Liminal," a simulation created by French artist Pierre Huyghe projected onto a screen, is one of Huyghe's latest pieces and will go on view at the Leeum Museum of Art in Yongsan District, central Seoul, from Thursday.

A still from ″Camata″ (2024-) by Pierre Huyghe [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

″Cambrian Explosion 16″ (2018) by Pierre Huyghe [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

The 62-year-old French artist, who chiefly works on site-specific installations, is holding his first solo exhibition in Asia under the same name as the simulation. Huyghe has previously shown his works at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The mechanism behind nurturing the “Liminal” simulation is moderately vague, with Leeum’s deputy director Kim Sung-won explaining Tuesday that the piece collects and feeds on external data, such as the temperature, humidity and pollution in real time via sensors shaped as large golden balls attached to the exhibition walls. Because of the simulation’s ever-changing nature, each and every scene shown to the audience will always be different.

“‘Liminal’ gains autonomous growth over time, but one that is different from humans,” Kim said. The piece is described as an “oracular figure,” one of the many ways Huyghe explores the relationship between humans and nonhumans, namely, animals or machines.

The word liminal is emphasized in the exhibition. Although it is literally defined as the intermediate stage of a process, Huyghe expanded its scope to refer to the emergence of an unknown entity in a transitory state.

″Estelarium″ (2024) by Pierre Huyghe [SHIN MIN-HEE]

Installation view of Pierre Huyghe's solo exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art, titled ″Liminal″ [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

Twelve installations are featured in the exhibition, including three newly co-commissioned pieces. The show was previously held at the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana art museum in Venice last year.

Huyghe has long embraced machine learning and artificial intelligence in his works as tools to produce his fictional worlds that are grounded in reality but evoke new realizations.

“Ultimately, the artist wanted to imagine a reality that deviates from the conventional concept of humans, the world that we created and our thoughts,” Kim said. Huyghe was absent from the press conference due to health issues.

“The artist hopes that if we look through a new lens, we’ll be able to understand our current reality better.”

″Idiom″ (2024) by Pierre Huyghe [SHIN MIN-HEE]

Visitors will also encounter the performative piece “Idiom” (2024-), in which a person wearing a golden faceless mask walks around in the exhibition. The mask, which is comprised of sensors, speakers and LED lights, generates a robotic, incomprehensible voice. The number of individuals will grow over time and form a communal language of their own.

Such works can be interpreted as Huyghe’s attempts at blurring the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, according to Kim, hence the active use of masks. Sometimes, they show situations that are out of human control, through animals, another recurring subject in Huyghe’s practice. In “Zoodrama 4” (2011), a hermit crab inside a glass aquarium nestles in a mask depicting a sleeping head, which is set to continuously change its position throughout the exhibition.

In other instances, the works question what being human really is. In an abandoned restaurant near Fukushima, Japan, a monkey, as the apparent sole survivor, dons a female wig and mask and repeatedly imitates the duties of the previous employees in the 19-minute video “Human Mask” (2014).

A still from ″Human Mask″ (2014) by Pierre Huyghe [LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART]

“In a world that is void of humans, we peer into an entity that puts on a mask and acts like human,” Kim said, “causing the audience to contemplate on the existence of humans.”

“Liminal” continues until July 6. The Leeum Museum of Art is open every day except Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. General admission is 20,000 won ($13.90).

The same day, Leeum also kicks off an exhibition on the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection, celebrating the Samsung Foundation of Culture’s 60th anniversary of establishment. Some 44 artworks, 27 of which are being shown to the public for the first time, are on view. The selection was not based on a common theme and features sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Sol LeWitt and Kim Chong Yung and paintings by Chang Ucchin, Mark Rothko and Lee Ufan. A date has not been set but the exhibition will roughly run for a year.

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [[email protected]]