Between 30th September and 3rd October, within the bare skeleton of the old Safehouse building, a silent dialogue unfolded — one about identity, life, cultivation, and the soul. As Saturn and Neptune retrograded back into Pisces, the final sign of the zodiac, a place of divinity and dissolution, Exuvial Theatre emerged with its own kind of cosmic energy, pointing toward a single question: What is the true face of the soul?
Curated by Dr Sophie Guo, the exhibition brought together Milan Zou, Jiaqi Liao, and Fei Li, three artists who each approached the exuvial state as both a physical and spiritual process. A performance of sound and body closed the show, giving the exhibition its most tangible form. Exuvial Theatre refers not only to the biological act of moulting but also to the spiritual act of letting go of form. Architecture, artworks, performance, and audience became part of the Exuvial Theatre.
The space is not the traditional white cube exhibition space: the wooden floor creaked underfoot, the staircase stood as a bare frame, and the walls peeled in patches of memory. This atmosphere of ruin became the audience’s first shedding — a subtle invitation to strip away polish and return to something raw and real.
The first space on the right features Jiaqi Liao’s work — a leather sculpture where red and skin tones intertwine like fragments of an uncovered body. It evokes a return to the maternal body: along the folds, ridges and faint facial traces seem still to breathe. In an overly rational world, Liao seeks a state where the “five senses” fall silent, allowing the sixth — pure consciousness — to become the origin of perception. Her “skin” is no longer a boundary but a field of sensing; its texture, suspended between membrane and fossil, suggests an awakening that begins not from reason, but from the body’s contact with the world.
Opposite her, Milan Zou’s painting resembles a self-portrait of a practitioner — bowed, silent, almost ascetic. She treats clothing as the starting point of practice, reversing the logic of fashion to strip away its decorative and symbolic roles, revealing its structure of power and spirit. Her Garment of Austerity recalls a monk’s robe — heavy, restrained, meditative. Its weight comes not from the material but from introspection: in shedding the outer layers of self, Zou rehearses the act of “de-phasing,” turning letting go into a method of awareness.
On the ground floor, the dialogue between Zou and Liao forms a loop: one returns to the origin of life, the other to the discipline of shedding — both asking how our souls evolve through layers of release.
Climbing the worn staircase, one enters Fei Li’s dark room.
Infrared light flickers; low frequencies pulse through the floor; the space itself vibrates. At its centre, a crystal cube holds carved memories — Li’s apartment in Shanghai during lockdown, a vase, fragments of domestic stillness. In Dies Irae, the deep bass rises like a subterranean prayer; the miniature house inside the glass seems both preserved and suffocated, a transparent soul suspended in time.
Sound loops within it like breath, like scripture.
Another work, a relief of the Virgin holding Christ, bears a cross-shaped code — the timestamp from the beginning to the end of its making. Faith and algorithm overlap: numbers become a language of devotion, time itself a vibration of spirit.
If Liao stands for the awakening of consciousness, and Zou for the discipline of letting go, then Li represents realisation — together they trace an exhibition that unfolds like a spiritual journey of the soul.
The exhibition closed with a performance of sound and body, conceived by Valerie Conghui Wang and Dr Weida Wang, with dark noise by Christos Fanaras and Butoh performances by Lucy Meringolo and Kali.
Bodies trembled, curled, and slowly unfolded in the bass vibrations — like souls being reborn. Space, sound, and breath merged into a living ritual. This performance completed the exhibition’s final transformation: from the shedding of form to the awakening of breath. When sound replaced matter and the body became the medium, Safehouse ceased to be a venue and turned into a living organism.
From the first floor to the second, the journey traced a spiritual progression:
Revise the shell of clothing, to the sensation of skin; from the architecture of dwelling, to the resonance of sound. From static exhibition to moving performance — a transition from form to breath, where space itself began to breathe.
In this process of shedding, the exhibition does not lead toward emptiness but toward the birth of awareness.
As the Diamond Sutra teaches:
“All forms are illusory; when one sees that forms are not forms, one sees the Tath?gata.”
Our lives, too, evolve through such cycles of practice and return. The soul, through countless lives, moves between letting go and awakening — again and again. Exuvial Theatre offers no answer. What it opens instead is a practice of release: after we have set aside form, identity, and reason, perhaps we can once more touch the true face of the soul.
