Fear (2025), by Yangyi Fu, is a work of art where Surrealism-inspired painting is recast as illustration, a banquet as a dystopic vision of a social ritual, and a human being as continuous with the universe, nature and other physical and spiritual beings. The scene is unsettling and uncanny: representation is deployed to convey conceptual and perceptual disorientation, as plates containingvisceral blobs of food sit alongside an overturned jar that leaks a crimson content, pooling like blood. Between the real and the fictional, haemorrhagic liquids are paired with disquieting trays of bones and bowls of pills, to the extent that one wonder if this is a clinical, cannibalistic, or culinary setting.
Yet, Fear, with its large and minute objects constitutive of a dining set, muted colour palette, dissolving, curvilinear, organic, and fragmented figure groups, is not only about ambiguous symbolism verging on the gruesome. Formally, human anatomy is rendered — as if in a hallucinogenic state — as melting, evaporating, holed, or composed of organic elements such as black granite or thorns; conceptually, this points to the interdependence of humans with the environment and the wider natural order.
Surrealist representation here is mobilised to transcend anthropocentric epistemology. In Fear, Fu exposes the dichotomous thinking that separated humans, elevating our species to a position of supremacy, and established the historically monolithic disjunction between nature/culture, object/subject, ‘self/other’, animal/human, and so forth. Therefore, she presents us with a cosmological stance which cannot conceive (as is the case from the anthropocentric point of view) of a psychic, ethical, and normative discontinuity between all things and beings that inhabit the cosmos.
A girl — the only a figure in this composition turning her back to this imagined, improbable social gathering, as well as to the viewer — functions as a trope not only for fear, but also for refusal. She epitomises our contemporary civilisation’s sense of uncertainly, emptiness, unrest, and scepticism towards a techno-scientific, post-digital and trans-humanist society. One is left with the idea that if the little girl could, as in a dream, turn around to share her opinion with us, her rejection would go far beyond the food on the table, extending to an acrimonious stance towards climate change, AI, and the cyborg. Her childlike thought would enunciate that the boundaries between human and non-human, spirit and matter, past and present, are always porous and fluid. By mobilising our imagination, Fu allow us to grasp that a child’s naïve, non-linear way of thinking, beneath its surface, contains profound and ancestral ways of knowing.
Fear reveals how severed contemporaneity is from the rhythms and safeties of the natural world; it also crystallises the still current and inexorable process of disconnection from nature. It exposes the transgression of the sacred, the misuse of the energies of our planet and of the social and biological body itself, which becomes the raw material of techno-capital extractivism and abuse, without either ritual or reverence.
Written by Kalinca Costa Söderlund
