Post - Animal Signal: A New Zoopoetics in Glasgow
28 July - 31 July 2026
Curated by
Bowen Wu
From 28 to 31 July 2026, Post-Animal Signal at Molend Space, Glasgow, brought together 24 artists and collectives across moving image, animation, sound, AI, digital systems, sculpture and performance. Curated by Bowen Wu, with Yaney Tang, Ivy Wei and Jiahui Huang, it asked whether 'the animal' remains a stable category when bodies, technologies, environments, myths and data overlap. Inspired by zoopoetics, the exhibition framed animals not as symbols to decode but as signals exposing the limits of human perception.
The strongest works kept this question materially specific. Madeline Mackay's Meat Body turned the human outline into a porous ecosystem; Alice Lenkiewicz's Extraterrestrial made a windblown plastic bag appear almost intentional. Daniel Kunda Han restored individuality to urban pigeons in Flight Path, while Lifei Zeng remapped the city through a seagull in A Seagull Game. Xinyi Chen reconnected meat with labour and death in Impure / The Others, and Sofia On examined how naming produces 'the animal' in The Idea of Animals.
Myth, memory and dream opened other forms of life. Anna Bagdasarian linked dragons, flightless hens and extinction to ecological anxiety, while Kavio Liu placed animals within childhood memory and the unconscious. In Little Pony, Moka Shen (Shen Ruoyi) recast Alice in Wonderland through a winged pony; Yea's Ferocious Fish Wraith carried an ancient Chinese creature into digital imagery. Zaozao Zhang's Zhuang Zhou Dreams of the Butterfly moved glass through performance, 3D scanning and animation; Lucy D. Xie (Xie Luji)'s Mountain Carrier imagined a creature as landscape; and Huan Wei's Poetic Nature of Animals Chapter Three let heartbeat and atmosphere precede classification. These works escape scientific order, yet sometimes return animals to vessels for human feeling.
Technology intensified that tension. In Collapse, Bettula & Miju, the duo Alžběta Huclová and Michael Goldschmid, animated photographic bodies between death and simulation. Hongkun Liu (AEND) invented virtual biology in Flesh-Bell Moth; Momogi's Ex Nihilo created evolving digital organisms; Jianfei Yu (Ink.YArt) combined imaginary creatures with AI-generated sound in The Folded Galaxy Chapter Three; and Lou Liska's Becoming-With AI approached AI through sonic companionship. Cheng Ji (Jian Jiao Qing) used hybrid creatures to visualise social pressures in A Room of Dreams, while Fan Yang's Divinity Zeroed staged moth metamorphosis through wearable sculpture. Flâneuse du Mal found nonhuman intelligence within film archives; Yong Xu (Cycles) fused fashion, make-up and AI in Phantom Bodies; Yuting Liu's Vital Continuum recast the city as a circulating organism; and Zhou Yaou, Liu Runkun and Yang Hanxiang's Posthuman Coding showed code producing posthuman bodies. Digital life, however, never escapes human archives, infrastructure or power.
The exhibition refuses a harmonious multispecies picture. Its 'signal' may be a call, noise, misreading or warning. Listening does not grant access to another life; it begins by admitting the limits of understanding and asking what responsibilities follow.