Sam Moore traces the artworks imagining new worlds in the wake of endings, from sleeping giants sculptures to shifting landscape paintings.
The Spell or The Dream (2025) – the vast sculpture by Tai Shani that lies in a vast coffin in Somerset House, the way a monarch might lie in state – is tender and softer than its scale might imply. At first glance, the artist’s creation seems like the kind of colossus or kaiju that would descend on a city in atomic age science fiction. But the flowing details on the figure’s white dress, the bursts of pink on the cheeks of their otherwise blue face, their closed eyes, the hands resting on their stomach carry with them the idea of a deep slumber, one that raises a question: what might cause such a figure to wake up?
Dreams have always had a specific resonance in speculative and weird fiction; the sprawling Lovecraft mythos implies that all reality in the author’s work is the dream of the fictional deity Azathoth. Shani’s sculpture, enormous in size and inhuman in its physicality, lies in an endless vigil, leaving us to consider what spell might have put them to sleep.
Sin Wai Kin’s film The Fortress (2024) explores the archetypal “Man” – the figure that looms over histories of art, politics, and colonisation. The beginning of Wai Kin’s film sees the artist preparing for a performance backstage in an empty theatre, donning a jacket that’s a faint shade of blue with the details of a suit sketched onto it. They read from a script, rehearsing their lines, making the declaration that “The past has all led to this, and the future will all come from this.” At first, this might be seen as a continuation of the arc of Man – that which has been ongoing for centuries – although the film’s real coup comes from how it subverts this, both through visuals and narrative.
Beyond the confines of the theatre, another figure emerges. There are echoes of the film’s first character in them – a similar costume, hair the same shade of crimson – but their makeup is vivid and otherworldly; a red infinity symbol snakes around their eyes, clouds and constellations float around their mouth and neck. The way this makeup shifts from the light blue of the sky to the darkness of night feels similar to Shani’s The Spell or The Dream, sculpted with bright blue hair and skin a different shade. These figures, existing outside the architecture of history as we might understand it, dare us to consider possibilities beyond what’s known.
Noémie Goudal’s Supra Strata (2024), meanwhile, turns nature into a fragile material; layers of it tear away like canvas or cardboard as the years do their terrible dance. What once was is shed without a care, even though what might be is still uncertain. The natural world is precarious here, and the question of what – if anything – will be left after humans have had their say on the world looms over the film. Much like The Fortress, Goudal’s work challenges the arcs of the world that we might have taken for granted.
Supra Strata formed part of Alien Shores, a group exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey that explored the different meanings and possibilities that are imbued within the landscape. The work presented here ran through forms and moments of art history, and one of its common threads felt explicitly speculative. Glenn Brown’s painting, Only the Birds and the Dead are Singing (2025), felt reminiscent of Azathoth’s dream, the roots and branches of a tree giving way to a face of wisps and clouds, with eyes a shockingly vivid green and hair like flowers. The human form and the natural landscape each seemed to create the other in response to themselves; the world is never a static thing moving towards entropy, but something stranger and more full of possibility.
Lining the wall in one of the gallery’s rooms was a quote from science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin: “The world’s vast and strange, but no vaster and stranger than our minds are.” The artists of Alien Shores were brought together by this willingness to embrace the strange, to try to shed the expectations of the past and consider what might lie beyond it. Ken Gun Min’s Everything we can imagine as light (2025) was a vivid, complex landscape that existed between cultural traditions and aesthetics. Using Korean sansu aesthetics – encompassing the observation of and connection to nature – and Christian iconography, Everything became a deeply singular painting of creation; its landscape existing between traditions, nations, and histories, and creating something new out of these fragments.
The figure outside the theatre in Wai Kin’s Fortress is challenged in their understanding of the world – even of their own creation – by a disembodied voice that pushes against the boundaries defined by dominant historical narratives. “You who seek only yourself,” it says, “in a world constructed of names that you made. When you said nature, you created a boundary of reality, and when you said beginning, you cut off all that came before.”
Across the show, “nature” was in perpetual redefinition. It strove to exist beyond this Man-made boundary of reality, both in tune with its past yet never just beholden to what has come before it. “I may situate myself in this story, but the beginning of the next story will be built on the end of this one,” Wai Kin confesses in The Fortress. It started at the end of the story, attempting to make sense of the wreckage of history on which it stood, wondering what could be built on it. With Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.1 (2025), Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu programmed a mechanical arm to paint and erase a rainforest scene over and over again, the landscape never permitted to become singular or static. This fate literalised an idea raised in The Fortress: “The beginning of the next story will be built on the end of this one.” Pandega and Imazu seemed to argue that the story is something destined (or doomed) to be cyclical, though perhaps the surrounding work in Alien Shores was what could break this cycle, by casting our eyes towards otherwise worlds that exist alongside and beyond our own.
It’s tempting to think of Shani’s suspended figure in The Spell as slumbering through something – as being representative of a world long-presented with warnings that fall on deaf (or at least dormant) ears. But I think that this sells short the otherworldly appeal of Shani’s figure. Taking root in the middle of Somerset House, they instead feel like something of an omen, as if, once the right thing happens, once the right steps forward are taken, their spell will be broken. There’s a delicacy to this understanding – that the arc of the world isn’t set in stone. It becomes a fragile thing to hold on to, like the façade at the back of Supra Strata, or the flickering light and crumbling theatre at the end of Fortress. Just as Wai Kin attests that the word “beginning” cuts off all that came before, so too might “ending” sever all possibilities of what comes next.
Words by Sam Moore
