Siew Guang Hong
 

orchid: stalking presents digital collages in which the artist’s hands and feet are reassembled into the likeness of the orchid mantis, an insect whose evolutionary adaptations place it in a zone of proximity between flower and predator. Its resemblance to the orchid is not simple imitation but an evolutionary becoming that reshapes the behaviours and perceptual cues within the flower–pollinator–mantis assemblage. In this dynamic, aggressive mimicry disrupts ordinary signifier–signified relations, attributing agency to the connections and movements of the small insects and ornamental flowers typically regarded as passive or peripheral.

The collages extend this chain of becomings through the human body: the mantis already mimics the orchid, and the body in turn mimics the mantis. Echoing the evolutionary operations that shaped the orchid mantis, the ontology of the image in orchid: stalking emerges through its materiality and deliberate artifice, functioning less as a trace of existing forms than as a mapping of new configurations of resemblance.