The Decay of the Angel: Boglárka Boruzs, Taiping Cao, Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo, Ge Hui, Wolfgang Günther, David Zink Yi

The exhibition takes its title from Yukio Mishima's last novel, Tennin Gosui (1971), the fourth book of The Sea of Fertility, in which the judge Honda follows one soul through successive reincarnations and is never certain that the body returning to him is the same one. The Japanese title, 天人五衰, names a Buddhist idea far older than the book. Heavenly beings are mortal, and five signs announce their end: the flowers in their crown wither, the robe is soiled, the armpits sweat, the body loses its light, and the being grows restless on its seat. The phrase reaches Mishima through the Noh play Hagoromo, The Feathered Robe. A fisherman finds a feather robe hanging on a pine at Miho and refuses to return it to the celestial maiden who cannot fly home without it. As he holds it, the signs begin to show on her body, the flowers in her hair the first to fade. He relents on condition that she dance, and she disappears into the mist beyond Mount Fuji. 

Walter Benjamin's angel of history faces the past and watches the wreckage mount while a storm drives it backwards into the future. The angel in this exhibition faces the other way. It belongs to a future already under way, and it does not observe decay from outside; the signs appear on its own body. Each work here is read closely for where they show. 

Ge Hui's Now Wait (至此等待, 2013) is a small oil on a torn-edged canvas: an angel standing in the rain, its body yellow-green, its wings grey, red lines running down the torso like veins or stitches. Nothing in it gives off light. Ge Hui came to painting from physics and collecting rather than the academy, and the picture has the bluntness of belief. 

Boglárka Boruzs paints a future she calls Saltpunk, a Budapest of 2199 where the Pannonian Sea has returned as a salt flat. Archon Activation (2026) assembles a figure from chrome drips, tubing and cable beneath a pale yellow sphere. In Gnostic cosmology the archons are the lesser powers that rule the material world, and here one is switched on. In Sunburn (2026) a mint-green form hangs in a blue sky and melts towards a dark horizon. The sun that lights her world is also what burns it. 

Taiping Cao works from the body's own records. The Shadow Within (2026) hangs a cylinder tiled with CT scans of the artist's skeleton, stitched with gold thread in the grid of the jade burial suits unearthed in his home city, Xuzhou, with lines from the Tao Te Ching set across its surface in Braille. Inside, two grey rib cages are lit from within and a single peach rests on the bone. The jade suits were made to keep a body from decaying; the scans record how far it already has. No Man's Land (2026) suspends metal footprints from curtains of gold thread, the body kept only as the marks it leaves. Suture3 (2026) hangs stainless steel bone sutures of the kind used in his father's heart surgery, bound by the gold thread he associates with his mother. Repair, in his work, takes two people. 

David Zink Yi's Angel, bist du es? (2011) shows two pairs of bare feet, one on the ground and one in the air. It comes from his filming of ritual dance in Cuba, where the camera stayed low to keep faces out of frame; when one dancer carried another, the carried body appeared to float. The title asks the question the exhibition keeps asking. Hung near Cao's footprints, the feet that left them are found. 

Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo draws on camp horror, bad romance and icons of film history. Her hands and faces, cast in plaster and finished in metallic silver and gold with flushes of pink, are caught in masturbation and orgasm, liquid-metal bodies at the moment of release. The two pages of The Bride! (2023), notebook sheets collaged with glitter tape, cut brides and grooms into a green scale pattern; one carries the line "silence isn't an option", the other is written over with the word incest. Pleasure and damage share the page. 

Wolfgang Günther's Reproduction (2026) lays a body across a dark blue-green ground, wrapped in a translucent white sheet. It could be a shroud or a bed. The title holds copy and birth together, which is the exhibition's other subject: in Mishima every death is followed by a return. 

What the artists share is a way of working. None of them gives the body whole. It arrives as feet, ribs, hands, a footprint, a scan, a wrapped shape, a figure made of parts. The angel decays in pieces, and the pieces are pieced together in the dance of the angel.