The Carnival of Lunar Animals

On February 18, 1886, a full moon lit the sky—the Ice Moon, as they call it. Around that time, French composer Camille Saint-Saëns pieced together one of his most famous works—besides Danse Macabre—as a kind of playful joke meant to be performed privately, amid laughter. The piece is Le carnaval des animaux, a suite of 14 movements featuring various animals, serving as a witty musical commentary on works by other composers. I was reminded of this whimsical zoological fantasy, created for carnival season, because in my imagination it coincides with the very moment when Henri Rousseau, also known as “Le Douanier,” must have conceived one of his first significant paintings, Un soir de carnaval. This small canvas debuted in August 1886 at the second edition of the Salon des Indépendants. Spectators and fellow artists laughed at the painting, ridiculing Rousseau’s amateurish style and his naïve portrayal of an odd pair—a woman and a white clown—who glowed brighter than the full moon in a naïve winter nightscape. This surreal, pre-avant-garde forest claimed the spotlight. Where was this pair headed, dressed so peculiarly? In the same year, likely under the same lunar phase and close to Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday, marking the start of Lent, fifty days before the first full moon of spring), both works resonate with carnival spirit—a reminder not to take ourselves too seriously. Carnival itself embodies three days of unrestrained celebration, rooted in the Latin term carnelevare: “to take away the flesh.”

A few months ago, as I viewed Michael Gao’s (Beijing, 2002; based in London, England) paintings in this exhibition, their strangeness struck me. I struggled to make sense of the images before me and thought of the post-Internet painting style prevalent among his generation—a real-time, social-media-shared, neo-neo-expressionist figuration marked by pronounced flatness. This style merges with the visual distortions of video games and simulators, echoing what Marcia Tucker, in 1970s New York, aptly dubbed “Bad Painting.” I’ve written about this before: this generation revisits reality (much like the late 1970s) but through the lens of screens and mobile devices, rejuvenating the painted world with a digital imaginary. This visual language plays, proposes, or even simulates a world that feels distinctively new—a generational hallmark. Gao himself described his paintings as a kind of carnival, where reality and fantasy, the familiar and the strange, overlap. Contemporary technology, bending the arc of time, collides with ancestral rituals that reconnect us to our animal nature. Gao’s works are filled with hybrid creatures—both tender and grotesque—juxtaposed in true carnival fashion. But where are these figures headed?

Some of these paintings feature animal characters who stare at us with human eyes, their gestures and expressions all too human. They are like modern shamans clad in animal skins, engaged in transformation (not mere disguise). This is metamorphosis into beasts—not Ovid’s or Apuleius’s creatures—but ones that challenge civility and behavior beyond their surface forms and fur. Other works showcase aerodynamic distortions of birds turning mid-air, as if their rendering glitches, or oversized insects brandishing traps, their own masquerade. Ultimately, these works reflect the carnival animals within us—a theme Saint-Saëns himself composed. If the mirror is a lunar object, passively reflecting what stands before it, then the screen magnifies and amplifies this reflection, fueled by desire. Meanwhile, the canvas—like Gao’s paintings—serves as an intermediary surface. It contains (by force) these characters while absorbing the bombardment of our desires, fears, phobias, and innocence. That is carnival: overflowing energy, unbridled excess, a rite of passage (it once marked the turn of the year), and a mystery unveiled when we lift the flesh, when we discover what lies beneath the costume—or beyond the primordial pull of the full moon. And so, these figures march forward. We march forward. A procession led by Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Tonight, even now, there’s a magnificent full moon out there, lighting up the cabaret of the world.