1) Project Title+Time+Description of the Lead Image
Project title:
When Animals Speak the Language of Power
Time and duration:
10 July – 10 August 2026
Presented during the Edinburgh Festival season (4 weeks, open to the public)
Lead Image:
The main drawing of this project selects the image fragment form in the artist Eryao’s work “Wishing Your Child Becomes a Dragon”: the dragon spliced by shadow puppetry materials keeps breaking, recombining, and moving in the picture. Its body presents an unstable and mechanical repetitive state, which not only retains the visual characteristics of traditional movies, but also transforms into the time structure in dynamic images. This circular and non-starting movement makes myth no longer exist as a fixed narrative, but as a power structure that is constantly copied and internalized in contemporary society.
2) Curating narrative texts
This exhibition discusses how mythical animals continue to operate in contemporary society and influence individual cognition as an invisible power structure, not just as cultural heritage or visual symbols. Drawing lessons from roland barthes’s viewpoint that myth is a kind of communication system, the exhibition takes “looking forward to success” in China’s context as the breakthrough point, transforming “dragon” from a traditional image into a social mechanism: it not only symbolizes success and authority, but also shapes people’s understanding of identity, body and future in repeated cultural narratives.
Focusing on the stop-motion animation and installations of the artist Eryao, the exhibition transforms the myth from “the object to be watched” to “the process to be experienced” through the organization of spatial routes. The audience entered the gradually compressed corridor with the words and pictures in light and shadow from the touchable shadow play materials, and finally placed themselves in the narrow black box space of circular play, feeling how the myth animal was continuously generated and continued in time. This temporal display mode also responds to Erika Balsom, an image exhibition researcher’s understanding of “exhibition as a time structure”.
At the same time, the exhibition regards curation as a kind of “cultural translation”, echoing Carolee Thea’s role as a mediator. By reorganizing the way of watching, the original hidden cultural structure can be perceived and reflected. The exhibition invites the audience to rethink: Are the myths we inherited still shaping our imagination of success and the future?
3) Artists and works
Eryao
Eryao is a young contemporary artist who pays attention to traditional media; her works often combine traditional materials with contemporary social issues. By reconstructing the traditional narrative, she transformed the myth into a contemporary expression about identity, family and social pressure.
The work reveals how the cultural expectation of “success” is repeatedly given a new context in the family structure through the continuously spliced and broken dragon-shaped images.
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith is an American contemporary artist. She has long been concerned about the relationship between body, nature and universe, and her works span sculptures, paintings and installations.
Placing the stars idling on the ground makes the audience overlook the “universe” and reveals that human beings construct cognitive order through naming and classification.
Raeyen Song
Raeyen Song’s practice pays attention to the ecosystem and micro-life, and constructs dynamic devices through organic materials and ceramics. Works: song~xian（2025） Materials: Microbes, ceramic devices. Explanation: Take microorganisms as “gods”, construct a myth system of non-human scale, and show that power is generated as a relationship network.
4) Spatial layout and location
Venue: Summer Hall-Scientines Gallery (including black box) Spatial structure: The installation works of Kiki Smith and Waeyen Song are placed in the right half. A glass showcase is placed between the two huge windows at the junction of the left and right halves to display relevant books and materials (which will be introduced in detail later, so I won’t repeat them here). Left half three-stage path lSpot A (entrance): natural light environment Show the shadow play dragon installation and text, the audience can touch and interact → “readable tradition” Corridor (transition area): Single-frequency images are played frame by frame, and the space is compressed → “myth in generation” lSpot B (black box): Images are played in a loop, and there is no clear beginning. The audience can watch from any frame at any time, which is very similar to the structure of myth.
5) Public projects
- Artist Talk Theme: Contemporary Translation of Traditional Myths Time: Day 2 of Opening Week, 60 minutes. Venue: Summerhall Red Lecture Theatre Object: Art students and the public. Content: Eryao shares movies and fairy tales, and discusses the cross-cultural context with the audience. Person in charge: co-chaired by the artist and the curator.
- Shadow Play Workshop Subject: Body experience of light and shadow. Time: 90 minutes at the weekend of the second week of the extension. Venue: summer hall anatomy lecture theatre Target audience: family, children and the public Content: Participants make and operate movie devices and experience the relationship between “manipulation” and narration. Person-in-charge: Artist Eryao leads and the curator assists.
- Reading Seminar Theme: myth and curatorial theory Time: the third week of the exhibition, 60 minutes. Venue: Summerhall Deans Office Participants: researchers (8 people) Content: Discuss Barthes and other texts, and explore myth as a curatorial method. Person in charge: hosted by the curator.
Note: the artist’s remuneration and venue fees will be listed in detail in the budget part, so I won’t repeat them here.
6) Elaboration of curatorial concept
This project adopts the curatorial method of interdisciplinary and field response, and understands “myth” as a continuous cultural mechanism rather than a static narrative structure. Based on Roland Barthes’ mythological semiotics and the study of China’s mythology, the exhibition transforms “Dragon” from a traditional cultural symbol into a structural framework for analyzing power, identity and social expectations. The curatorial practice is based on the space conditions of Summerhall. It has the structure of black box environment and natural light intervention, so that the exhibition can generate a temporal viewing experience between “controllable” and “uncontrollable”. Through the tactile image device at the entrance, the frame-by-frame animation in the transition space, and the images played circularly in the black box, the audience experiences the process of myth generation while moving, rather than passively accepting the established narrative. Image circulation and nonlinear time structure strengthen the social mechanism of “expected repetition” This project transforms the curatorial process itself into one of the exhibition contents, makes the knowledge production process visible through archives display and publications, and constructs a multi-level understanding path. Public projects (lectures, workshops and reading groups) further transform the audience from viewers to participants, and jointly generate meaning in discussion and practice. On the ethical level, by introducing the research framework of local myths in China, the exhibition avoids single interpretation of other cultures with western theories. At the same time, we respond to the cognitive differences of different audiences through multilingual texts, audio descriptions and Easy Read materials, and transform “accessibility” from technical supplement to a part of curatorial methods. The project thus formed an open, critical and socially responsive curatorial practice.
7) Basic budget
8) Description of publications
The publications and archives in this project are presented as part of the exhibition structure, not as supplementary materials. Its contents include curatorial texts, summaries of interviews with artists, excerpts of mythological research documents and image materials, which form a “research interface” for reading and staying. The exhibition will combine Chinese and western theoretical frameworks, such as Roland Barthes’ exposition on “myth as a symbolic system” and Yuan Ke, Mao Dun and Ye Shuxian’s research on China’s mythological structure, and at the same time, it will be interspersed with North Island poems as a linguistic response. These materials are presented in the form of pages, excerpts and images, so that the audience can not only watch the works, but also enter the knowledge and narrative process generated by them.
总结
When animals speak the language of power is a contemporary curatorial project with mythical animals as the breakthrough point, aiming to explore how mythology can continue to operate in contemporary society and shape individual identity cognition and social expectation as a hidden power mechanism. The curatorial logic of the project gradually deepened: from “the translation of traditional media” to “the juxtaposition of time” to “myth as a structure” and finally implemented as an immersive image plus space curatorial project with “how mythical animals operate as a power mechanism” as the core. Under this framework, myth is no longer regarded as a static cultural heritage, but is understood as a system that continuously generates meaning. Focusing on the puppets and stop-motion animation works of contemporary artist Eryao, the exhibition transforms “dragon” into an expectation mechanism that is constantly copied in the family and social structure through the cultural context of “looking forward to success”. At the same time, the works of Kiki Smith and Raeyen Song are introduced to build a multi-level power network that spans human and non-human scales, from body cognition, ecological relationship to micro-generation. On the spatial level, the project relies on the Sciennes Gallery in Summerhall to construct a temporal path consisting of natural light, transition passage and black box space. The audience enters from the touchable traditional materials, gradually experiences the process of image generation, and finally finds themselves in a circular image without a starting point, thus transforming the myth from “the observed object” to “the experienced structure”. In addition, the project will expand the exhibition into an open knowledge production platform through file display, publications and public projects (lectures, workshops and reading groups), so that the audience will change from passive viewers to participants. On the ethical and methodological level, the project emphasizes the responsibility of curation in the cross-cultural context, and avoids cultural simplification and single interpretation by combining western critical theory with China myth research. At the same time, through multilingual texts, Easy Read materials and multi-sensory paths, “accessibility” is transformed from an auxiliary strategy into a part of the curatorial structure. Generally speaking, this project is not only a reappearance of the visual image of myth, but also a critical practice of how power is naturalized and internalized through cultural narration in contemporary society.
