The Lure

On summer nights in fishing villages along China’s southeast coast, the sea is often lit up. Fishermen use lamps to lure squid to the surface, a scene like a river of stars pouring down, a “ritual of light.” This ancient yet highly technologized fishing practice shows not only a tacit understanding between people and the sea, but also the complex sensory relations between living beings and technical media. The artists take it as a point of entry, returning to observe and reflect on this field where light and shadow interweave.

What light-luring implies is not only the reality of ecological plunder, but an aesthetic trap within a regime of perception. Squid are drawn by the light, and people, too, amid the “light” of the technologies, images and consumer culture they have made, gradually lose command of their own perception.

This installation theatre does not focus on technology itself. It tries to understand phototaxis from a posthuman perspective: between the squid’s biological instinct toward light and the human projection of meaning, direction and desire lies a deep similarity of sensory structure. The “light” we attend to is not only energy and bait, but a systemic mechanism that steers perception and manufactures desire.

So the artists designed a theatre of illumination and enticement. Through moving image, sound and biological materials, it pierces the romantic surface of the lamplight to point to the perceptual power and ecological complexity within. Viewers are invited, amid visual pleasure and ecological anxiety, to rethink the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between the senses and ethics.

In the process, an imagination of co-feeling and co-existence quietly unfolds: a poetics of perception no longer centred on the human may be slowly surfacing from faint scents and trembling light.