PIERRE HUYGHE

2024-11-09

2025-03-30

Opening

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locations

WINSING ART PLACE

“When I start a project, I often need to go create a world. Then I enter this world, and what I explore in it is the work itself.” ——— Pierre Hugues

Five blind Mexican tetra quietly float in an artificial cavernous fish tank. They coexist harmoniously with this space since the establishment of the Cultural Center in 2019. After five years, the bare stone sculpture has become covered with red algae, and the aquarium no longer needs additional feeding. With the change of day and night in Taiwan, this work has formed a self-sufficient ecosystem that maintains its own balance. French artist Pierre Hugues proposed whether blind fish evolved from different rhythms of the day and night, thus exploring the dynamic relationship between organisms and the environment, which also leads us to question our own way of survival.

Interactions between humans and non-humans play an important role in Hugo's work, and these elements can be learned, adjusted, and evolved, whether animal, plant, or neural network. “We usually think of exhibitions as an end, the result of something,” says Hugo. However, the exhibition is not really the end of a process, but a changing ritual — it is the beginning of a journey to other places.” He sees art as not a simple display, but an ever-evolving process experience. In his works and exhibitions, it is not only a display of art, but a process that encourages the audience to think and participate.

Using Kassel's 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition Untilled, Hugo created a new ecological chain on uncultivated land, combining concrete sculptures with beehives, gradually covering the sculpture's head. This work explores collective thought and self-organization, which, as the bee's life cycle changes, forms the interdependence of the work with the environment around it, making the sculpture a creature that interacts with the environment and the audience. After aLife Ahead, the 2017 Münster Sculpture Program, transforms the old ice rink into a complex interplay of heterogeneous organisms and technical systems, combining unique cancer cell mutators, including HeLa cells (Eternal Cancer Cells) that respond continuously to the exhibition environment.

In a March 2024 exhibition at the Venice Customs Museum of Modern Art, Hugo blurred the lines between reality and fiction, delving into the interaction between human, non-human and machine learning. Viewers and machines learn in the dark, and in this world, humans are not the core of sovereignty. The work and the exhibition as a whole are changing, transforming, surviving and evolving, and the memory absorbs the information of perceptible and imperceptible events in the exhibition, constantly expanding, as if it were an unpredictable ritual where new possibilities are generated and coexisted.

This time, Camata, a collection of skeletons shot in the Atacama Desert of Chile, follows the exhibition of a skull in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It is controlled by machine learning to intervene, direct and edit images in real time. Another golden-yellow mask, Idiom, detects specific features that humans cannot perceive through sensors and converts that information into specific vowels and sentences to create its own language. The exhibition also looks back at the early works Crystal Cave and À Rebours, reflecting on the traditional boundaries of human and other entities, and the meaning of reality and fiction in contemporary society, in lifeless fur coats and reborn forms.

Exhibition view: Untitled, 2022. Photo © Gerardo Landa & Eduardo Lopez - GLR Estudio

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Artist Biography

Pierre Huyghe

Born in Paris, France in 1962, Pierre Hugo's work spans a wide range of media, including film, limited production, sculpture and environment. His works are considered speculative fiction stories, often presented as a continuum between various forms of intelligence, including biotechnology and tangible inert matter, which are able to learn, change, and evolve. He has held solo exhibitions at international art institutions such as the Venice Customs Museum of Modern Art, the Serpent Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pompidou Art Center in Paris, and the Tate Gallery in London. Hugo has received numerous awards and honors, including the Hugo Boss Prize in 2002 and 2017 and the Nasher Sculpture Award.

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