LAUREN TSAI ANNOUNCES THE DYING WORLD EXHIBIT
Embodied in its own title, The Dying World asks: Where do forgotten ideas go? And more importantly: Do they forget us in return? Like the sensation of dreams slipping into nightmares, time in The Dying World bends and pulses according to emotional logic rather than plot progression, coherence and incoherence drift in and out of frame. In Lauren Tsai’s solo exhibition, an immersive, time-based media installation, the viewer enters not a story, but a state. Anchored in stop-motion animation and animated by memory, the exhibition blurs the boundary between subject and object, fiction and maker.
Nestled within the atmospheric grounds of Hollywood Forever Cemetery, this nocturnal exhibition unfolds behind the Cathedral Mausoleum, where a single house appears uncannily amongst monolithic stone and palm. The site’s layered history, with its gothic architecture, mythic associations, and quiet vastness, mirrors the project’s own liminal nature. In Tsai’s hands, a place of public remembrance becomes a vessel for private reverie. This is not a showcase of a short film nor the unveiling of a fixed body of work. It is the debut of a world Tsai describes as populated by ideas, suspended in a transitory state where they wait to be either remembered or forgotten entirely.
At the center of this world stands Astrid, a character not born of narrative necessity but of persistent emotional truth. She is not Tsai’s mirror, nor her mask. There is a line, drawn clearly and deliberately, between where Lauren ends and Astrid begins. They exist in separate worlds, evolving on parallel timelines. Astrid is her own presence, her own pulse. And The Dying World is the space she inhabits. Visitors enter Astrid’s bedroom, a meticulous installation modeled in part after the fictional world occupied by the character on screen, and after Tsai’s own childhood room in New England. Throughout the house, drawings, paintings, and looping stop-motion pieces stretch this moment into multiple dimensions. Each screen, whether a vintage CRT monitor or a large-scale projection, is treated as a moving painting.
The exhibition resists traditional storytelling in favor of something more primal: sensation, stasis, repetition, and ritual. Crow, the second figure in the work, is one such idea—unwanted, but enduring. Astrid gives him her time so that he might go on existing. In return, she becomes unstuck, lingering in a space neither past nor future, neither alive nor lost. Each puppet, crafted by Andy Gent and the artisans of Arch Model Studios, is an extension of a deeper impulse: to make memory visible, to give emotion physical form. An eternal dusk blankets the space. The trees, whether inside this space or out, do not sway. Astrid turns her head toward a window but never moves. She is always waiting.
By reframing the exhibition less so as an exhibition and more so as an open ended scenario where potential narratives may emerge and disappear, Tsai effectively a living archive of process and presence. Alongside the immersive sets, audiences encounter preparatory drawings, miniature sets, sonic environments, and sculptural works—each one part of an obsessive, intentionally anti-efficient process rooted in analog technique and emotional exactitude. The drawings serve not as plans, but as artifacts of an idea unfolding across time. The installation invites multiple scales of being. At one moment, the viewer may feel giant—godlike in their perspective. At another, they are drawn down to Astrid’s scale, peering through her windows, sitting at her desk. The world shifts size and tone, never offering a fixed vantage point. It is not meant to be interpreted so much as sensorially felt.
Tsai’s practice has long been shaped by the animated films she grew up watching, spastic universes where emotion governed space and fantasy was treated as truth. That early influence continues to guide her approach. Working through a nontraditional process, she builds and rebuilds fragments of a film rather than pursuing a single, linear story. The result is a living archive of process and presence, a film that exists before it is finished, a dream assembling itself in real time. This in turn finds expression in her painting practice, where Tsai translates that same internal logic of space into the tactile language of the canvas. Her paintings contain both microscopic and macroscopic detail, entire worlds nested within gestures, expanding and collapsing with an imaginative lyricism. It is as if she has reverse-engineered the logic of painting itself, using brush and color as instruments to map feeling across multiple scales.
Tsai’s work is not an escape from reality but a reframing of it. Her puppets are not projections of self but witnesses to a deeper interiority. The drawings, paintings, and film loops together form an offering, one that honors the delicate, often overlooked persistence of thought. Like the cemetery it inhabits, The Dying World is a site of regenerative memory and loss, of stillness and ongoingness. It is a reminder that nothing truly disappears, it only waits.
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