Slugs, AI, Ghosts: Richard Hawkins’s Haunted House

We know we’re in a haunted house: Slug Sex (2025) – a video projection of two encircling slugs – is our first sight in ‘The Garden of Loved Ones’. Its cast light catches in the cobwebs of the gallery’s darker corners. The slug who deigns to top pushes out a goopy blue phallus that runs the length of its body, slugs being a hermaphroditic species. And this, being a Richard Hawkins joint.

Around the bend hang the 2012 ‘Ankoku’ collages, exhibited in that year’s Whitney Biennial. These compositions – hastily cut archival materials and notes taped intuitively beside printouts and calligraphy – mimic the notebooks of Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the postwar Japanese dance form Butoh. Their posthumous publication disclosed how Hijikata approached choreography with a collage-like glom, pasting gestures torn from Western art history books alongside handwritten directives. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario write in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2019), Butoh – which roughly translates to ‘waltz of darkness’ – is a loosening of signification that champions ‘arbitrary chains of movement [and] diseased or socially dispossessed peoples, or bodies in pain’.

A specific generational ‘sickness’ of body and moral character haunts these rooms. The tortured contrappostos Hijikata clipped are also shorthand for a homophile sect, which Hawkins references in his own interventions, free-associating Roland Barthes, Hans Bellmer, Jean Genet, Yukio Mishima, Pierre Molinier and the gay pornography of Jean-Daniel Cadinot. Loosening the vernacular of this collage body, ‘Delectable Parts’ (2018), exhibited down a murky stairwell, pushes the muck further with inky gobs that recall the atmospheric cuts and sutures made by late filmmaker Luther Price.

The exquisite tension of the exhibition lies in the collage’s animation into movement via digital imaging. The first example presents itself like a tapestry, facing our sordid slugs. Digital video Redon Spider Sequence (2025) moves over collaged reproductions, documentary-style, until a dancer appears, suspended in the frame. He stutters to grim life, his body puffed then deflated, like a lung, reigniting Butoh’s originary ghost-in-the-shell concerns in its disquietingly disembodied flutter.

Made with AI technologies, the work displays some grotesque amalgam of corporeal uncanny and computer unconscious. Hawkins tricks generative software into producing spew like those the Victorians faked in ectoplasm photography, fully realized into spasmodic movement that lurches with Butoh’s abject jerks. Say ‘AI’ at a party and people bristle, but this is the most conceptually sound use of the medium I’ve seen to date. If Hijikata tugged a new genre out of gestural threads in abstract expressionism and art nouveau, then Hawkins is wise to subvert AI’s siege on our collective image bank to germinate these queer exorcisms.

This metonymic queer body/sick body is fundamentally ecstatic, which is to say, a transforming or transcending body: out of flesh and into pure experience. The digital video Disfigures Sequence (2025) explodes with carnations, lobsters and choreography. Overripe symbology was the homophile subjection that Hawkins contextualizes within Butoh’s putrescence of form and meaning. Now, that has evolved, and we see queerness function as a kind of footnote: from Genet’s writing to the early works of ANOHNI, where self-destruction is a means of ritual divination or, as Eva Hayward has argued, in ‘More Lessons from a Starfish’ (2008), ‘the cut is possibility … [Not] so much an opening of the body, but a generative effort to pull the body back through itself in order to feel mending, to feel the growth of new margins’. Is this why ANOHNI placed a 1977 photograph of Butoh’s grand dame, Kazuo Ohno, on the cover of her record The Crying Light (2009)? It’s a sensibility she nails on her song ‘Frankenstein’ (2005), crooning radiantly of reanimation from her own haunted house: ‘This is a vision of love.’

Richard Hawkins’s ‘The Garden of Loved Ones’ is on view at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong until 24 May

^{Main image: Richard Hawkins, Slug Sex, 2025, digital video, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; photography: Felix S.C. Wong}