DE SARTHE is pleased to present its second solo exhibition for Shanghai-based artist Caison Wang, titled Limerent Warrior • The Digital Reincarnation. The exhibition features a new body of works on canvas and a sculpture that predicts a hypothetical post-human era wherein spirituality has been abdicated, and data logic is embraced in its stead. In this imagined future, there is a strong distrust of the present, causing existing belief structures, even emotional mechanisms to be thoroughly rewritten. Humans gradually relinquish control over lived realities, entrusting decisions of love, infatuation, life, and even death to algorithms. A wildly colorful, dystopic read of the future, Limerent Warrior • The Digital Reincarnation opens on November 22nd and will be on view until January 17th.

A prominent motif runs through the exhibition – a powerful female figure, accompanied by symbols of birth and procreation; this is the limerent warrior, a fictional character that Wang imagines to be the face of post-human humanity. Using the Buddhist and Hindu goddess Mahākālī – the great mother who governs time, destruction, and rebirth – as a prototype, the artist imagines the warrior to be the digital reincarnation of what humans had once fantasized to be pure love, as well as the data mother to the new calculated world. Through the limerent warrior, what was once expressed through literature, mythology, film, and personal narratives are now produced through code and programs, and the once romantic hero of human imagination becomes both a product and agent of an intimacy economy.

The limerent warrior does not have a physical body but is encapsulated within digital modules: her emotions are translated into parameters, desires modeled after functions, and romantic scripts encoded as iterative logic. Wang places her in various narratives of encounter, affection, waiting, and sacrifice, yet each cycle is not a continuation of romance but a parameterized reset.

In the exhibited artworks, the artist utilized glazing - a traditional painting technique that creates depth and color via layers of transparent paint – in reference to mid-century depictions of deities and significant events. The integration of this historic process with the artist’s ongoing use of 3D modelled imagery draws a line of continuity through the past, present, and future, while alluding to the artist’s role as both the creator of gods as well as their devout craftsman.

Wang has also incorporated symbols of animals as well as everyday life: serpents, cranes, and tigers act as visual metaphors for desire, fidelity, and betrayal, while smoking, drinking, dates, and pets highlight the commodification of desires. Interwoven with imagery of breastfeeding, childbirth, and reproductive organs, Wang constructs a narrative wherein the organic and fabricated are amalgamated, and lines between fantasy and nightmare are blurred.