PufferFish 刺魨
PufferFish 刺魨 / 2026
PufferFish 刺魨 / 2026
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION:
PufferFish is a mixed‑media kinetic installation that uses the pufferfish’s defensive strategy—swelling to deter predators and storing poison as protection—as a framework for thinking through the continuous negotiations that organise intimacy.
Conceived by Kavieng Cheng in collaboration with Agassiz Chan 陳晉希 and Charles O’Brien, the work stages a fragile mechanism of closeness and defence, translating emotional dynamics into a looping choreography of breath, distance, and risk.
At the centre of the work, a balloon inflates and deflates in a measured, regular rhythm, functioning as a surrogate lung. This repetitive expansion and collapse establishes a relational pulse: each swelling is a declaration of boundary, each subsiding a conditional invitation to come closer. The looped movement evokes a state in which connection is sustained only through constant recalibration—too much proximity risks rupture; too much distance drains the bond of vitality.
Around this vulnerable core, a dense array of needles forms a quiet yet insistent perimeter. Their configuration renders visible an otherwise intangible field of threat and defence, suggesting that every approach carries a latent potential for injury. What is often internal—self‑protection, suspicion, the reflex to withdraw—is here externalised into a spatial schema: how do we construct elaborate safeguards at the very moment we seek contact? At what point does the impulse to shield oneself harden into a low‑level toxicity that seeps back into the shared environment?
PufferFish resists the impulse to romanticise. Instead, it foregrounds the survival logic that shadows closeness: love appears not as a state of seamless fusion, but as a precarious co‑existence that must be continually managed through distance, tension, and restraint. What ultimately links the imagined figures around this mechanism is not uncomplicated tenderness, but a mutual implication in the same economy of breath—the same cycle of inflation and collapse, demand and withdrawal, holding and near‑breaking.
In this way, the installation functions as an aesthetic diagram of ambivalence. Defence and desire are structurally entangled; the chamber that holds air also holds the possibility of rupture; the very gesture that keeps harm at bay risks becoming harmful in itself. PufferFish stays with this paradox, tracing how intimacy can fold under its own pressure, yet keeps returning to the same rhythm, again and again.
Approx. size:
50 cm × 200 cm × 50 cm
Materials used:
Mixed‑media kinetic installation: acrylic, metal, mini computer, needles, balloon
