Shapeshifter

Solo Exhibition
HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, 2025

Exhibition Link | HOW Art Museum
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Human exploration of shapeshifting initially stemmed from the examination of our own limitations, and later evolved with the advance of technology and imagination since the Industrial Revolution. While classic literature, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, engaged in bodily shape-shifting of gods and humans, modern shape-shifting narratives like Ghost in the Shell deal with human-machine integration. Yet, both share the same desire to transcend the biological self. With this in mind, artist Ce Jian’s solo exhibition Shapeshifter breaks away from anthropocentric cognitive limits and delves into the theme of shapeshifting from a perspective of fluidity rather than transcendence.

In her Armada series, Ce Jian draws inspiration from the “dazzle painting” technique, invented by the British Navy during World War I. This method, which used abstract geometric painting to camouflage and transform physical objects, is reinterpreted in Jian’s work. What initially appears as randomly arranged color blocks on the canvas rises into three-dimensional illusions when viewed from different angles. Seemingly stable spatial perceptions suddenly shift to wobbliness. These virtual bodies, transformed through visual flow on a two-dimensional plane, represent a form of reverse colonization, where the two-dimensional shapes colonize the three-dimensional. They articulate the first layer of “shapeshifting” in this exhibition while also embodying Ce Jian’s core artistic inquiry: painting is both a material entity and a complex visual language capable of reconstructing physical space.

The Sentinel series breaks away from the single-point perspective of the Renaissance tradition and merges with cutting-edge, game-based VR technology. These uncanny and supernatural humanoid machines compel the viewer to move continuously through the exhibition space in search of the “correct” viewing angle. The bodily engagements make the act of viewing itself an integral part of the artwork. As viewers shift their bodies to capture the complete image, they also undergo a “shapeshifting” — from passive observers to active participants.

Philosopher Donna Haraway, in her groundbreaking essay A Cyborg Manifesto, proposed a vision of human-machine coexistence. This hybrid subjectivity, transcending technology, species, and virtuality, challenges power structures and conventional identity categories. In Jian’s Species and Sphinx series, a similar empirical approach deconstructs the fundamental opposition between the mechanical and the biological. Her portrait-like figures are not just machines but speculative models of new species. Jian draws references from drawings of both real and mythical creatures in natural history books, and the outcomes are hybrid bodies of both organic and synthetic characters. They are not merely cyborgs but organisms that seem to exist in a continuum between the past and the future. At once fearsome and eerily alluring, they wait to be discovered in their downy habitats.

Through interdisciplinary approaches to natural history, mythology from both East and West, industrial production, and digital technology, the four distinct series in the exhibition illustrate Jian’s central idea on shapeshifting. She employs a flexible and logical visual language to construct an organic life system that spans from material bodies to spatial virtual fantasies. The shapeshifters she creates are not mechanical extensions of the human body but adaptive mutations of environmental evolution. They possess their own agency and systematic discipline, rejecting both anthropocentrism and binary thinking. The exhibition explores the natural shift in power dynamics between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces, between the physical and the virtual. Here, shapeshifting is not merely a formal alienation but an open-ended reconfiguration of content and a reconstruction of cognitive frameworks.

Curated by Zheng Guo