Gruelling performance art, sinister photography… and silkworms: the end of human dominance imagined at Hong Kong’s Cattle Depot Artist Village

A sense of impending doom pervades Unit 12 of Hong Kong’s Cattle Depot Artist Village, where an exhibition has just opened in the dank, un-air-conditioned former slaughterhouse during a week where the weather has alternated between insufferable heat and violent downpours.

The title itself is foreboding. “Post-Human Narratives – The Co-existing Land” suggests we have to brace ourselves for a future in which human beings no longer have the dominant say.

One would hardly expect a bed of roses from a group of nine socially aware artists amid widespread human and natural disasters, a global pandemic, and Hong Kong’s own unsettling political changes. But they are not content with wallowing in grief. Two things stand out from this independent, non-selling exhibition: a desire to find a new, workable social paradigm by interrogating the very foundation of knowledge and identity; and the dedication of those particular artists who have tethered their works to their physical presence.

The idea of a “post-human” narrative, curator Kobe Ko Wing-lam says, isn’t all that alarming, because we are already not entirely human. “We cannot live without our smartphones any more, and prosthetic implants are so common now that the whole idea of being human needs to be qualified,” she says.

If we are not wholly human, then we are basically cyborgs and all existing identities that we traditionally rely on become suspect, Ko adds. Taking her cue from Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto, Ko invited the nine artists to ponder how we can move on from today’s divisive society, and to look for affinity and ways to coexist.