Artist: WeiXin Quek Chong

The body in transformation—shedding, merging, mutating—is at the heart of moulting pangs, a new solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist WeiXin Quek Chong (b.Singapore; living in Madrid, Spain). Drawing from the speculative worlds of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Chong delves into a sensuous landscape of form and fluidity - amorphous shifting and the pluriversality of bodies—resisting categorization in the constant struggle of becoming. Reimagining the gallery space as a cavernous, creaturely interior, Chong’s new body of works includes sculpture, installation, video and prints.

Within the faux fur-lined alcove, the hanging sculpture net worths basketball-reminiscent hoop and net adorned with suspended glass amulets filled with salt embodies a tension between seduction and surrender, its materials evoking both intimacy and estrangement, preservation and dissolution.

In Xenogenesis, Butler imagines a post-human future where alien and human forms merge in a negotiation of survival and desire. Inspired by these interspecies intimacies, Chong’s series of silicon sculptural works evoke the discomfort and necessity of moulting—the casting off of old skins to make way for new forms. This process is as much visceral as it is conceptual, reflecting the "pangs" of transformation, bodily or otherwise. Bodies are sites of constant negotiation—between species, genders, and power structures. Similarly, in this exhibition, Chong investigates the instability and permeability of form, suggesting that identity and embodiment are neither fixed nor singular.

The largest work in the exhibition evokes the form of a shark’s egg-case — commonly known as a mermaid’s purse. Enveloped in folds of translucent silicon and mesh, the sculpture suggests a gestational state, simultaneously protective and alien. Its glistening, organic contours blur the line between body and vessel, gesturing toward transformation as both a biological and speculative act. Chong's materials—whether tactile sculptures, sound, or organic matter—mimic biological processes and blur the lines between the technological and the corporeal. Just as Butler’s Oankali merge with humans on a genetic and affective level, Chong’s works gestures toward a plural, entangled future where bodies are always in flux, never fully knowable, and constantly remade through relation.

In the innermost chamber of the gallery, Humic Moods unfolds—a video work composed of whispered and textual fragments from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - the last sayings of the delusional and dying Kurtz, paired with the image of a disembodied hand gently stroking a banana leaf. Together, these elements evoke the unsettling implications of an extractivism stripped of empathy. While Conrad depicts a descent into the violent degradation of the dehumanising mindset, the work gestures toward Butler’s Xenogenesis, where a similar reckoning with human destructiveness leads not only to collapse, but pushes into transformation. In this shift, Otherness becomes more than threat- it becomes a site of crucial evolution.