Second Skin: Creature Self-Portraits
Text by Sungah Serena Choo (Independent Curator)
To write about this practice critically means avoiding the comfort of biography as a neat interpretive key while acknowledging that, in this work, the body is never a metaphorical prop. The artist’s childhood was marked by an exceptional medical reality, a rare kidney condition, long stretches in the hospital, repeated removal from ordinary school time and social continuity. What persists is not a stable narrative so much as an imprint with contradictory temperatures but fear and comfort fused at the origin, the hospital as both refuge and enclosure. This contradiction becomes a sculptural logic. Where memory cannot be held as story, it returns as material procedure—fragment, seam, shell, surface. The work does not represent the body, it shows how the body is made encounterable through protocols, coverings, classifications, and the quiet violence of being handled.
In Fedotov-Fedorov’s language, the concepts of ‘laundry’ and ‘clean’ are not domestic motifs but institutional operations as epidermal regimes. In the hospital, fabric is never simply warmth. It is instruction. You are wrapped, covered, restrained, changed, exposed, and covered again and the body is translated into an object that can be processed. Fabric becomes an interface between body and institution, a membrane that looks gentle precisely because it is designed to work without spectacle. The choice of ‘fleece’—cheap, ubiquitous, reliably comforting—sharpens that contradiction and softness becomes a public language of care that can also function as a technology of compliance. Softness does not need to coerce, it absorbs. It trains the body to accept what is being done to it, and trains perception to interpret that acceptance as normal.
The social life of this processing expands beyond the clinic into everyday navigation, where otherness is learned as a practical discipline, how to avoid being singled out, how to remain readable, how to protect a private interior without making it visible. What the artist calls the “social mask” is not theatre but technique which controlled disclosure, calibrated self-presentation, a kind of code-switching that produces a “double face” when circumstances demand it. The self becomes a practiced performance of steadiness, not out of vanity, but because public space often rewards recognizability and punishes deviation. In this light, the exhibition’s emphasis on masks, accessible ‘pharmacy’ tools, and the calm optics of protection sharpens into a question. ‘What does it cost to appear acceptable, and what parts of the self are quietly neutralized in order to keep moving?’
Perhaps this is also where the work turns toward the viewer not to accuse, but to train a different sensitivity, to learn how to be gray, faceless, to inhabit the colorless interval where one is neither fully visible nor fully erased. Fedotov-Fedorov’s palette repeatedly returns to desaturated tones such as near-skin, near-bone, washed and drained as if cleanliness were a kind of bleaching that makes a body passable by reducing its signals. Facelessness, then is not only lack, it is a survival posture, a neutral stance held in the gray zone which a second skin that shelters the self by refusing to give the world a stable handle.
Erving Goffman’s idea of the “false face” clarifies the cruelty of this arrangement. Public order is preserved when everyone recognizes the performance yet agrees not to expose it. The mask becomes a shared pact and Fedotov-Fedorov pushes this pact toward a sculptural problem. What does it mean to live as an image others require you to maintain? What does it mean when the face is not simply an expression but a social contract? When “identity” becomes the maintenance of a surface, the body’s interior is not liberated, it is eclipsed. And yet the exhibition suggests that the “false face” is never a single layer. To put on one mask is to reach for another almost instantly, until masking becomes indistinguishable from the body’s outline that caught in the hairline, absorbed into habit. What remains can feel like an empty vessel, a shell that reads as inhabited whether or not anything is safely present inside. Taxidermy intensifies this paradox. It preserves by building form around absence—sometimes enlarging, idealizing, or correcting the figure so the pose holds, the gesture stays dynamic even as it is frozen. When the false face is lifted away, it does not guarantee revelation but it may reveal only another surface and another version of “you” made legible. Idealization, too, can be a mask.
This is where the artist’s sculptural practice becomes decisive, not merely because it uses textiles or found clothing, but because it adopts a taxidermic logic, a method for keeping what cannot stay. Taxidermy, here, is not trophy or shock. It is a technology of preservation that stabilizes presence without guaranteeing life. It preserves form while admitting, quietly, that what has been preserved is a shell. It produces the uneasy feeling of being near something intimate that is also no longer fully available. And it does so through craft procedures that echo both domestic labor and medical handling like stitching, stuffing, binding, sealing. These gestures sit on the threshold between care and operation, between tenderness and restraint.
Fedotov-Fedorov’s sewing is not ‘handmade authenticity’ as an aesthetic. It is a language that carries surgical memory without illustrating it. The seam is simultaneously repair and scar, intimacy and evidence. The act of stitching becomes an insistence that the body especially the institutionalized body is always already mediated by procedures. This is why the work feels post-digital in a specific way not through explicit references to screens, but through a refusal of frictionless immateriality. In a moment when bodies are continuously abstracted into data, profiles, and images, the artist returns to stubborn material tasks—old techniques, archival handling, craft labor—because identity is still made at the level of matter. The self is fabricated. The self is processed. The self is laundered.
The use of the artist’s own leather jacket, shoes, worn garments sharpens this taxidermic premise into something like reincarnation. Clothing is the most intimate public surface. It sits between body and world, holding sweat, shape, habit, posture. When those garments are reworked into sculptural skins, a private archive becomes visible without turning into confession. The wardrobe becomes a small cemetery of selves through material that has lived with the body, now preserving the body’s absence. This is a crucial inversion rather than trying to reveal the self by stripping layers away, the work acknowledges that the self is produced through layers, through coverings. At this moment, identity is not behind the surface, it is formed as surface.
The exhibition’s creaturely forms extend this argument beyond the human portrait into an ambiguous pre-human register.
In this exhibition, that power is never innocent. The creature is what the institution cannot fully name, what the social order cannot comfortably host, what the family of acceptable faces cannot absorb without remainder. And yet these creatures are also self-portraits insistently so. Not self-portraiture as likeness, but as condition which the self pictured before it is stabilized into identity. If classic self-portraiture promises interior truth, Fedotov-Fedorov proposes a more fragile and more political claim. The creature becomes an autobiography not yet translated into acceptable language. It is the self at the moment of formation shaped by institutional care, social masking, and the ongoing requirement to remain legible. This is why “second skin” is the exhibition’s sculptural axis. A second skin is an interface which protective, intimate, and never neutral. It can shelter, it can restrain, it can warm and it can discipline.
Fedotov-Fedorov’s sculptural language is strongest precisely where it refuses to separate the intimate from the institutional. Otherness is not offered as a concept to be affirmed and resolved, it appears as a material condition that shapes bodies and faces. The social mask is a lived technique that migrates into form and taxidermy is not an aesthetic gimmick, it is a way of keeping the self present without pretending that presence can ever be whole. Moreover, craft is not ornament, it is an insistence that identity is made through procedures that can shelter and neutralize at the same time. And so the broken warning that Fedotov-Fedorov referred from Erving Goffman returns at the end not as slogan but as diagnosis “do not sleep”—not because something is hunting you from outside, but because the most effective forces are already within the everyday—within softness, within cleanliness, within care, within the faces we wear so others can keep their peace. It is all around, and because it is so close to be seen unless the work teaches us, painfully and tenderly, how to look. In that gray faceless interval, we are left to ask not what is hidden, but what has been softly erased so that we may pass through the world without friction.
