Other Worlds, Weaving, and Shipwrecks: Three Perspectives on History

Contemporary artists have always found creative momentum in history and cultural heritage. This is evident in previous Sigg Prize exhibitions. For instance, Liang Shuo’s In the Peak (2019) features a scaffold made of thousands of bamboo poles, transforming the terrace of the M+ Pavilion into a utopian grotto filled with meandering paths. In Wang Tuo’s The Northeast Tetralogy (2018–2021) video series, he explores historical dilemmas and contemporary predicaments in China’s history over the past century. Echoing this recurring theme, the Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition presents three compelling new works, inspired respectively by an ancient text about mythology, weaving traditions, and archaeology.

The fantastical ancient Chinese text, Shanhaijing, has been a source of inspiration for Heidi Lau in recent years. What intrigues her is not only its depiction of landscape myths and outlandish creatures, but its worldview of embracing infinite possibilities. Almost all living beings in the book are hybrids, such as Luoyu, a fish-like creature with avian wings, and Zhulong, a human-faced dragon with a serpent body. They embody the ancients’ hopes and curiosities about the natural world. Lau transforms these imaginations into Pavilion Procession (2025), an installation of ceramic sculptures that explores decay and rebirth. Blending personal experience and Taoist philosophy and ceramics with mechanics, she created a mythical beast, a limping robotic spider that stumbles among jagged peaks and a ceramic pond, as if navigating an unknown world. By borrowing the ancient concept of grave goods—objects buried with the deceased to equip them for the afterlife—Lau turns her gaze to the loss of a loved one, reflecting her complicated relationship with grief, time, and death.

Lau created the ceramic sculptures for Pavilion Procession through the demanding process of mould-making and firing. Though ceramics is not her area of formal training, these works reveal how she brings painterly brushstrokes into her treatment of texture and colour. Ceramics, as a medium with an extensive history, allows her to fuse her understanding of existence and decay, life and death, and frailty and strength through the sustained act of shaping and sculpting. Within the context of contemporary art, she builds a unique world that transcends time, one with echoes of the Shanhaijing.

Bi Rongrong is fascinated by the world’s weaving traditions. In To Connect, To Cut, To Draw (2025), she studies totems and patterns from the history of human civilisation and combines them with traditional lace-making techniques to examine their role as metaphors for the present. Her work presents six large textiles as the backdrop, each featuring an assortment of patterns, including Shang dynasty oracle bone script characters such as 巫 (meaning witchcraft) and 十 (a crisscross-shaped character with agrarian origins). Together, these elements tell stories about the relationship between nature and human activity. Her work weaves the shared yet divergent developments of Xiaoshan lace from China’s Zhejiang province and European lace, while evoking motifs and totems inspired by scarification traditions of Nigerian tribes, patterns that recall the texture of lace. This shows that her work does not fixate on a single cultural phenomenon; rather, it casts a dynamic eye on the signs and associations embedded among different materials and ethnic histories.

Trained in traditional Chinese landscape painting, Bi reimagines the age-old concept of ‘taking the imagination on a landscape tour’ as a way of looking at nature, space, and the environment from shifting perspectives. In To Connect, To Cut, To Draw, steel frames interspersed among other materials are a visual echo of the matrix of threads in woven textiles. The overlapping structures consist of different mediums: embroidery, weaving, drawing, collage, copperplates, and even animation. Using the three core methods of lace making—connecting, cutting, and withdrawing—Bi brings together seemingly complex visual elements into an installation that resembles a piece of openwork lace hung on a wall. She applies compositional techniques from painting to the work’s three-dimensional layout, revealing layered relationships among the patterns and, through them, her views on art and nature.

Taking a different approach to history, Hsu Chia-Wei ventures into new territory with The Sound of Sinking (2025), a video installation that uses archaeoacoustic theory and methodology to explore regional history through sound. Over the past seven years, Hsu has worked closely with archaeologists, expanding his explorations from land to underwater. It was through this process that the work came into being. Anchored in the remains of three sunken warships in the Taiwan Strait, the installation consists of three loosely defined sections: video footage of archaeologists using sonar detection devices and playing musical instruments at the shipwreck sites; an animation that reimagines a historical warship in motion; and a segment combining virtual reality and a live feed of the gallery space. The video begins with documentary imagery and concludes with scenes that blur the boundary between virtual and real. Playing throughout the installation is a submerged soundscape, blending sonar recordings, folk songs, military drums, and experimental music.

The shaping of history is often traced through texts and images, yet sound is absent from historical narratives. As the work’s title suggests, sunken sounds may carry within them clues to history’s unwritten chapters. Hsu intends to engage visitors’ auditory senses, immersing them in a sonic environment that sparks the imagination of historical events and figures. The use of a multiscreen format in the video serves as a reminder that all narratives, or imaginations they inspire, are human constructs, one of many possibilities. At the end of the video, documentary footage and virtual imagery merge into one, giving way to a red-tinted live feed that shows figures and objects suspended in midair—a reflection of Hsu’s thoughts on the violence of war, untethered from time and space.

In the Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition, these three artists present distinct perspectives on the complexities of personal experience, collective history, and human civilisation. They reinterpret traditional forms and innovate within the frames of ancient narratives. They approach history as a fluid and continuous whole, through the prism of ageless patterns. They harness the latest technologies to retrace historical narratives and extend them further back in time. Their works take shape across different mediums, drawing from history and culture to offer a profusion of possibilities for understanding the present.