Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce the group exhibition Chorus of the Dangled, on view from August 9 to September 6, 2025, featuring artists Alex Carver (b. 1984), Brianna Leatherbury (b. 1995), Natasza Niedziółka (b. 1978), Kentaro Okumura (b. 2002), Thérèse Oulton (b. 1953), and James Prapaithong (b. 1996).
‘Don’t rip me away from myself!’ he entreated……In spite of his cries, the skin was peeled from his flesh, and his body was
turned into one great wound; the blood was pouring all over him, muscles were fully exposed, his uncovered veins convulsively quivered; the palpitating intestines could well be counted, and so could the organs glistening through the wall of his chest. The piper was mourned by the rustic fauns who watch over the woodlands, his brother satyrs, the nymphs and Olympus, the pupil he loved, by all who tended their flocks or herds on the Lycian mountains.[1]
——Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book Six. 382–400
In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas, emboldened by his musical prowess, challenged Apollo to a contest. Defeated, he was flayed alive by the sun god. His body found no peace even after he perished in excruciating pain and regret. His skin, nailed to a pine tree, trembled at the faintest sound of the flute. This tragedy thus became a cautionary tale against hubris and arrogance. The pain and delirium Marsyas stood in stark conflict with the legitimacy of his punishment, embodying the enduring artistic tension of sensibility and reason.
Yet going beyond its didactic aspect, subtle traces of “modernity” shimmer beneath the myth’s narrative. Viewed through the lens of the body, the story holds contemporary resonances: “flesh” detaches from the “body” to become a new storyteller; the exposure of the internal cavities brings along with it inner experiences. Thus unfolds a drama of the body: before the punishment, the intact and enclosed form contains Marsyas’s emotions and inner life. During the flaying, a part of the self is violently torn from its original physicality, unleashing intense internal upheaval. The stripped skin, once the tactile interface with the world, transmutes into a fossil of “being.” His remnants, now entwined with the pine tree, stand as the ruins of a body, morphing into a new “nature.” Marsyas’ hysteria fades within the pine, yet the individual paradoxically begins to intertwine with the world through this very dissolution of the bodily whole.
Grounded in these concepts, Chorus of the Dangled draws on the satyr’s two states—the “body being flayed” and the “body as a trembling relic within nature”—to articulate the following modalities: the “perceptive body” and the “archival body.” Through these parallel trajectories, the exhibition explores the corporeal and material nature of painting and other art forms, alongside the writings of the six participating artists.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world,” the “perceptive body” interrogates the reciprocal notion that while the body constitutes a world, the world also reverberates through the body. Whether fully captured or not, the bodies in this exhibition point—across various media and materials—to a shared understanding: the body is both a site of internal perception and emotion, and as a manifestation of the inscriptions of the external world. Through the artists’ deliberate “dissection,” private sensations and mental workings are discharged through brushstrokes and imagery, rendering the body a porous locus for the exchange of experience.
The “archival body,” on the other hand, focuses on what remains—veins, skin, and flesh, with artwork itself existing as a variant of material residue. These fragments, separated from the body, become “sensory fossils” awaiting exploration—bearing the history, environment, and events experienced by the subject. Rising from bodily rupture and spiritual persistence, they occupy the margins between “object” and “human,” undergoing delirious metamorphosis into a new nature.
In this exhibition, viewers will encounter Alex Carver’s interrogation of the membranes through medieval punishment, surgical technologies, and natural landscapes; Brianna Leatherbury’s anthropomorphic forms, reconstructed from copper-plating ready-mades preserved in cooling units; Natasza Niedziółka’s embodied landscape embroidery; Kentaro Okumura’s liminal oscillations between memory and figuration; Thérèse Oulton’s Wagnerian terrains; James Prapaithong’s meditation on “presence” in the uninhabited, These delirious, spasming bodies, abstracted or returned to nature, echo the arc of Marsyas. Traversing the artists’ perceptions, memories, and spirits, they surge with turbulence, writhe in pain, or repose in stillness. Woven seamlessly into diverse contexts and narratives, they become the inner eye, disordered faculties, chaotic synesthesia, and autonomously wandering flesh.
When artwork becomes the “flesh” unravelling from artist’s inner world, when the body, the primary agent of sensorial perception, liberates itself from the tenuous construction of “human,” and when corroded boundaries between person and object are sutured, new truths about man and the world emerge. The hysteria buried beneath has never vanished; rather, it remains within the shackles of identity, ritual, gender, civilization, production, and technology. The sensuous body, hypnotized as a capitalized body, is paradoxically reawakened the moment “flesh” becomes re-embodied. In all its forms, Marsyas’s body has never ceased its wailing. Those who stumble upon the pine, at once a fossil and a world, will hear the sounds of flesh flowing, growing, and trembling.
[1] Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 182–83.
Text/Wang Luqi
Edit/Alyssa Fu
