Pierre Huyghe often describes exhibitions not as endpoints but as beginnings. Most artists complete work before opening day; Huyghe's works continue to change throughout the exhibition period, incorporating viewers, time, and contingency into their structure. In interviews, he has described his interest in placing visitors inside an exhibition as a living system—observing what happens when people are thrown into conditions they cannot immediately read.
This was why, when Liminal opened at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2024, I traveled to see it. And why, when the exhibition traveled to Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in 2025, I traveled again. I wanted to see what translation does to a work designed around disorientation.
Venice: Being Thrown
The first room at Punta della Dogana is darkened. On a large screen, a naked woman performs gestures. Her face—extending to the back of her head—is hollow. Not painted black, but simply absent: when she turns sideways, the background is visible through the void where her face should be. Concrete blocks are placed across the floor in the near-darkness. Several visitors stumbled. A guard called out: no flash. Someone had turned on their phone light to navigate.
This is the exhibition functioning exactly as designed. Huyghe places visitors inside conditions of uncertainty—spatial, perceptual, interpretive—and watches what occurs. The stumbling is not a design failure. The guard's warning is not an interruption. Both are part of the system.
Behind Liminal, Human Mask plays on a large screen in a loop. A monkey wearing a human mask and dress moves through an empty izakaya in Fukushima's exclusion zone, performing service gestures—bringing hand towels to tables, carrying sake bottles—in a space uninhabited since 2011.
Watching this alongside Western visitors wearing audio guides, I became aware of a gap. For a Japanese viewer, the izakaya is not a neutral setting—it is where colleagues gather after work, where social hierarchies are temporarily suspended, where the rituals of daily life play out. Saru mawashi, traditional monkey performance, carries its own complex history of labor and spectacle. Fukushima remains an open wound in Japanese collective memory. These codes are not available to viewers without them. Huyghe embeds this gap within the work: cultural translation is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be experienced.
Liminal shows a faceless human body. Human Mask shows a monkey wearing a human face. The reversal is precise: identity is prosthetic in both cases, removable, transferable. What constitutes a self when the face can be absent, or borrowed?
This question runs through UUmwelt-Annlee. In 1999, Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased AnnLee—a minor manga character from a Japanese animation company in Akihabara, intended for disposal—and distributed this empty figure to artists, each of whom filled her form with content. The project's title, No Ghost Just a Shell, drew directly from Ghost in the Shell—Masamune Shirow's cyberpunk manga exploring consciousness and the boundary between human and artificial intelligence. That Huyghe found, in the peripheral economy of Japanese anime production, a figure embodying his central concerns—identity as vessel, selfhood as construction—is not coincidental. In Japanese visual culture, the bishōjo has long functioned as an empty form awaiting projection. Western artists discovered in it a structure they needed.
UUmwelt extends this further: through neuroscience research from Kyoto University's Kamitani Laboratory, brain activity recorded during visual experience and during dreams is fed into machine learning systems, generating imagery from cognitive states that cannot otherwise be externalized. The work asks whether shared consciousness without language is possible—and whether the attempt itself reveals the arrogance of assuming we can access another's perceptual world at all.
Seoul: What Translation Adds and Removes
Several months later at Leeum Museum of Art, the same works were not the same works.
The concrete blocks in the first room were positioned in a well-lit area. There was no possibility of stumbling. A figure in a mask—Idiom, the AI-generated presence that moves through the venue—was accompanied by a museum staff member who illuminated the floor ahead with a flashlight, guiding visitors safely around it.
Both decisions are defensible. Both change the work.
In Venice, visitors were thrown. In Seoul, visitors were guided. The disorientation that Huyghe designs into the experience—the darkness, the stumbling, the uncertainty about what is work and what is staff—had been partially resolved in the name of visitor safety and operational management. What was added: accessibility, clarity, comfort. What was lost: the condition of not knowing where you are.
Liminal's faceless figure, which I had read as motion capture in Venice, revealed itself in Seoul as AI-generated—the movements more overtly artificial, the generative process more visible. In Seoul, Liminal and Human Mask were installed back-to-back, creating a direct dialogue the Venice spatial arrangement had not produced. The faceless human and the human-faced monkey, facing each other across a threshold: the reversal became structural rather than merely thematic.
Camata—robotic arms rearranging glass spheres around skeletal remains in a desert—had evolved its machine learning algorithms between the two showings. A work dated "on-going" had, in fact, continued.
Huyghe's claim that exhibitions are beginnings is not metaphor. It describes a material fact about how these works exist in time. What I saw in Venice was a version. What I saw in Seoul was another. The translation between them—geographic, institutional, cultural—produced both gain and loss. That gap is not incidental to the work. For Huyghe, it may be the work itself.
