Weixin Quek Chong: moulting pangs | ai
Many of this exhibition’s works suggest empty egg sacs and shedded skins, through clever use of silicone and mesh. Taken together, they left me feeling pleasantly horrified.
The location really helps. The exhibition is staged in the gallery’s basement, inside an empty, disused swimming pool, tiled in turquoise and white. A changing room and sauna on the same level forms side galleries. There’s a rickety temporary staircase down to the bottom of the pool, and a message warning us that only one person can climb down or up at a time.
The shedded skins and sacs are strung up and spotlit like religious relics - or maybe hunting trophies. Ed Gein meets Alien. Her sculptures made me wonder: what beasts have cast off these skins or emerged from these eggs? I found myself regretting I hadn’t visited on Halloween.
By contrast, the show notes claim that we are seeing “a sensuous landscape of form and fluidity”. And that we’re meant to rejoice in the “pluriversality of bodies”.
For her part, Chong says she’s influenced by sci fi author Octavia E. Butler. This connection is acknowledged by a well-thumbed paperback copy of Dawn, part of the author’s Xenogenesis trilogy, placed at the gallery’s entrance.
As their title suggests (xeno meaning foreign, genesis meaning creation or birth), Butler imagines a future where alien and human forms merge - and breed. Butler emphasises the progressivist potential of such couplings.
But for me this stark, silent, tiled space and its hollowed-out depths created an immediate sense of unease, even dread. Did Chong intend to render Butler’s optimistic speculations as something horrible?
Weixin Quek Chong: moulting pangs is at ai., London. 25 September - 22 November 2025