Kohta will inaugurate its new year on 22 January 2025 – two days after another inauguration that will be all over the news media – with a solo exhibition by Zhang Xu Zhan (Taiwan, 1988, lives in Taipei).

In recent years, Zhang’s visually compelling and subversively humorous video installations, featuring stop-motion animated films based on papier-mâché figures and plot lines from East Asian mythology and fairytales, have attracted attention throughout the international art world. He himself was born into a family that trades in traditional paper figures, used for ritual ceremonies or funerals.

At Kohta Zhang will show Termite Feeding Show, a new work that combines stop-motion animation with acted performances and has been installed only once before, in an abandoned house in Taipei. This is is own work description:

‘Climate crisis, energy disasters, the fantasy of the Anthropocene and a sci-fi fable of insect diets. Inspired by a real news story: “Termites chewing through power cables causing major blackouts in mountainous cities.”

To adapt to sudden ecological changes brought about by climate change, ‘termites’ have shifted their dietary habits, turning their attention to artificial cables as a new food source.

In the damp, shadowy ant tunnels, insect restaurants feature musicians playing cooking melodies while butchers handle the food (meat portions), showcasing their culinary skills with cable-based dishes. This serves both as a sacrificial offering to the gods of ecology and an act of revenge against humanity.

Is this a fable of insects imagining a future diet in the face of climate disaster, or a reality show where ant-men in disguise exact revenge on humans through a feeding spectacle?’

Simultaneously with his exhibition at Kohta, work by Zhang is also on display at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine, as part of the 2024 edition of Future Generation Art Prize where he was awarded the Special Prize, and at the 11th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia.