2025 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series at The CourtauldWing above Wing, Flame above Flame 翼覆翼，光覆光 : The Pataphysics of Sensing Penny Yiou Peng

Image courtesy of CROSSLUCID (https://crosslucid.zone)

We are often told that the future is foreclosed – captured as data, predicted by climate models, or rendered through algorithmic feeds. This pervasive sense of inevitability, which Mark Fisher described as ‘capitalist realism’, operates as a perceptual trap that has ‘colonised the horizon of the imaginable itself’. What if this foreclosure works not only at the level of ideology and the imagination, but through the senses – training us to only see what is already recognised, and to only value what demands attention?

In this lecture, writer, scholar, and dramaturg Penny Yiou Peng approaches psychedelic reason as a sensory and somatic practice: a conscious, enacted attunement to forms of vitality, energy, and attention that dominant systems of reality tend to suppress and disavow. Drawing on collaborative and interdisciplinary artistic projects, Peng invites the audience into subtle perceptual realms shaped by alternative sensorial technologies – from ecological rhythms and Daoist flow of energy, to magic and speculative fabulation. The lecture explores how art might recalibrate perception, loosen habitual ways of seeing and bring us back to our senses.

Free entry, sign-up essential.

This is the third event in the 2025 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series: Psychedelic Reason. This annual programme of artist talks, conversations and screenings provides a platform for artists, curators and scholars of East and Southeast Asian heritage to share their research and practice with wider audiences, focusing on issues of transculturality and representation in the global contemporary.

Convened by Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at The Courtauld; Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director at Asymmetry; and Dr Yayu Zheng, Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld.