“In the Great Wilderness, countless beings unlike any other dwell.” 「大荒之中,多有異人。」
– The Classic of Mountains and Seas 山海經 (circa 4th century BCE – 2nd century CE)
In lands far beyond, Hindu cosmology recalls an ocean of milk churned by gods and demons, yielding nectar of immortality entwined with fatal poison. Across the sea, Mesoamerican legend speaks of new worlds born from the body of a sacrificed monster. Such myths remind us that creation is often forged at the crossroads of wonder and dread – at the threshold where the monstrous and the miraculous meet.
In today’s border-blurred world, bodies just as strange wander – some cloaked in illusion, some bearing hidden names. These “monsters” walk among us in altered guises: hybrid identities, mutated by migration and time, challenging the walls between cultures and categories. Monsters at the Crossroads: Myth, Mutation, and the Politics of Passage is a forthcoming exhibition that conjures a contemporary bestiary of these liminal beings. Opening May 26, 2025, at a poco art archive in Culver City, this show carries forward the dialogue begun in SPRING/BREAK New York, “Borders of Paradise: Liminal Creatures of the Floating World, reuniting artists Liu Tianlian and Tiger Chengliang Cai and welcoming Jasser Membreno into their cosmological conversation. Curated by Ann Shi (founder of a poco art archive), the exhibition explores how mythic imagery can illuminate the politics of passage – the rites, trials, and transformative possibilities of crossing from one realm into another.
Liu Tianlian’s intricate paintings draw from Chinese mythology, Buddhist cosmology, and ghost lore to navigate the charged terrain of femininity, migration, and spectacle. Trained in the meticulous gongbi style on silk, her works unravel traditional narratives with uncanny detail and symbolic density. In Royal Wedding in Hell (2022), she reimagines the classic tale of Zhong Kui marrying off his sister as a hallucinatory infernal pageant: demons carry glittering dowries, chimeric dancers cavort under carnivorous blossoms, and Zhong Kui—China’s famed ghost vanquisher—follows in anxious procession. At the center, his sister sits silently in a wedding palanquin, radiant yet spectral, as if uncertain whether she is bride or offering. Rather than comic relief, as in historical woodcuts or operatic scenes, Liu’s version is a kaleidoscope of unease—a vivid hellscape where ritual, gender, and duty collide. This is no paradise lost, but a banquet of expectation: a forced union in a world governed by performance and protection, love and labor. Her art becomes a silk-bound scroll that folds past into present, asking: in the theatre of belonging, who chooses the script—and who must play the monster?
Through kaleidoscopic panoramas of color and chaos, Tiger Cai channels cosmic myth into futuristic parable. In the tongue-in-cheek titled Churning the Donut Nebula (and Birth of the Conflict), a colossal serpent coils through a neon galaxy, its body stirring up cosmic swirls of vibrant blues, pinks, and oranges (aka the “donut nebula” or the “donutverse”). This apocalyptic-psychedelic vision nods to the Hindu saga of Samudra Manthan – the churning of the cosmic ocean – reimagining it in a sci-fi register where nebulas and mythic beasts collide. Working across painting, animation and digital media, Tiger bridges traditional allegory with cybernetic aesthetics. His compositions probe creation and collapse in equal measure – the “milk” of human aspiration swirling together with the “poison” of conflict – ultimately suggesting that from upheaval, new constellations (and new conflicts) are born. Both carnivalesque and critical, Tiger’s art situates mythic monsters in the age of the spaceship and the algorithm.
Joining the cosmological procession is Jasser Membreno, whose practice weaves together the layered mythologies of Mesoamerica and Central America—drawing from his Mexican and Honduran heritage—and refracts them through the lens of a first-generation Latinx experience in Los Angeles. Membreno constructs a radiant, insurgent mythology, in which pre-Columbian deities, Catholic saints, Nahuales (shapeshifting spirit-animals), and haunted urban relics collide across fluorescent landscapes.
In works like Tongue Tied Directions and Face Off, monstrous figures twist through fields of tropical flora and spiritual iconography—their limbs contorted, their tongues knotted, their gestures caught mid-incantation. These are bodies burdened with memory and divine residue, straining to speak across languages, cultures, andrealms. Membreno describes his subjects as “hybrid deities of diaspora”—part ancestral, part futuristic, vibrating with glitch, folklore, and survival instinct. Rendered in searing color and comic-book surrealism, his paintings evoke both ritual and rupture: a migration story told not through linear narrative, but through sacred disorder. In his world, to leave one homeland and arrive in another is not a clean break—it is a ceremonial mutation. By blending Indigenous cosmologies, Catholic mysticism, and pop-cultural kitsch, Membreno reclaims the monster as a sacred messenger of liminality: a body that remembers, resists, and reinvents.
Together, the works of Liu, Cai, and Membreno form an unruly pantheon of liminal creatures. Monsters at the Crossroads embraces the monster as a potent metaphor – not a thing to be vanquished, but a guide to transformation. Here, monsters stand at threshold points: between realms, realities and borders, between utopia and apocalypse. They embody the in-between – a state of flux that is by turns disorienting and generative. With speculative poetics and curatorial depth, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how we mythologize the “Other” and how crossing a border can be akin to slaying a demon or shedding a skin. Each artwork is an act of storytelling as well as an academic inquiry, drawing from texts like Shan Hai Jing, the Mahabharata, the Popol Vuh and beyond, yet speaking urgently to present-day questions of identity and belonging.
