Penelope and the Seahorse

Full description

Research Background

This research investigates the hippocampus as a conceptual node connecting marine biology, classical mythology, neuroscience, and ecological crisis through immersive installation at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. The project explores how the multivalent meanings of hippocampus—seahorse genus, mythological creature, and brain structure governing memory and imagination—can generate layered networks of association that mirror the organ's own function of flexible memory reconstruction. By combining the museum's antiquities collection (Roman pottery, funerary urns) with handmade bronze seahorses and contemporary Starbucks cups, the research establishes a methodology for collapsing temporal boundaries between ancient and present material culture. This juxtaposition traces the passage of mermaid and siren symbols across time, demonstrating continuity in human fascination with aquatic hybridity from classical mythology to contemporary corporate iconography. The work responds to neuroscientific understanding of how the hippocampus enables imaginative projection by creating an installation environment that operates through similar principles of recombination, where archaeological artifacts, biological specimens, and consumer objects coalesce into what the artist terms a "futuristic vision of marine life as ghostly apparition."

Research Significance

This project makes significant contributions to understanding how contemporary installation art can activate interdisciplinary knowledge systems—spanning biology, mythology, neuroscience, and environmental studies—to create embodied experiences of cognitive and ecological interconnection. The significance lies in demonstrating how artistic practice can function as a form of flexible memory association itself, operating like the hippocampal network to recombine disparate temporal scales (deep pagan past, modernity, future scenarios) and knowledge domains into unified experiential fields. By foregrounding the seahorse's threatened status alongside its mythological and neurological resonances, the research addresses how installation art can hold multiple crisis narratives—habitat degradation, overfishing, cognitive fragility—within poetic rather than didactic frameworks. This work advances understanding of how aquatic-themed environments can function as sites for imagining alternative futures while acknowledging ecological loss.

Research Contribution

The research establishes new approaches to installation practice that employ scientific nomenclature and neurological processes as generative structures rather than illustrative content. Through the strategic deployment of the hippocampus as organizing principle—simultaneously subject, metaphor, and method—the project contributes knowledge about how exhibitions can enact the cognitive processes they reference, creating environments where viewers experience flexible memory reconstruction and imaginative recombination. By placing Roman funerary urns alongside handmade bronze seahorses and mass-produced Starbucks cups bearing mermaid logos, the work advances understanding of how material juxtaposition can reveal the persistence of aquatic mythological symbols across millennia—from ancient siren imagery to contemporary consumer culture. This archaeological-to-contemporary assemblage method demonstrates how museums' historical collections can be activated through contemporary artistic intervention to expose continuities in symbolic systems. The research contributes knowledge about how installation can operate across deep time, weaving together extinction narratives, ancient cosmologies, and futuristic visions while revealing the ongoing cultural transmission of marine hybridity myths, ultimately demonstrating art's capacity to hold ecological grief, scientific wonder, archaeological evidence, and mythological thinking in productive tension within immersive spatial environments.