Green Snake: Women-Centred Ecologies

When I was younger, my mother told me a story about a man who travelled to a faraway lake in China, where he met a beautiful young woman dressed in white and spent the night on her boat.

- Ysabelle Cheung

Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong

Bolstered by his good fortune, the man drank excessively. When he awoke, the woman had vanished. In her place was a giant white snake, as thick as his own body and twice as long.

The many variations of this story in East Asian culture are united by the same cautionary message: beware the shapeshifting monstress. In recent years, however, queer and feminist movements have reclaimed this common tale, interpreting the woman-snake’s fluidity as a strategy for empowerment and survival amid violent, patriarchal societies. This re-examination is at the root of ‘Green Snake: Women-Centred Ecologies’, a group exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, consisting of more than 60 works by 30 artists and collectives, curated by Kathryn Weir and Xue Tan with Tiffany Leung and Pietro Scammacca. Here, the snake also serves as a symbol of water (its curves resemble a meandering river) and, as such, it unites our ecological crisis and the historical othering of Indigenous communities by white settlers with modes of feminist resistance.