Department of Cultural Affairs

“Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking along the bridge over the Hao River…” So begins one of the most famous philosophical exchanges in classical Chinese thought. The two thinkers de-bate whether humans can truly know the happiness of a fish. 

Zhuangzi says the minnows in the water are enjoying themselves. Huizi counters, “Since you are not a fish, whence do you know what fish enjoy?” Many remember Zhuangzi’s witty re-buttal: “Since you are not me, whence do you know that I do not know what fish enjoy.” But few recall how the debate ends, with Zhuangzi stating calmly, “I know it from the bridge over the river.”

Observation is such a deceptively simple word. But how exactly did Zhuangzi observe? Was it the rhythm of the fishes’ fins, fluttering more vigorously than usual? Or the number of care-free leaps just beneath the shimmering surface? And if we gave Zhuangzi a thermal imaging camera, would he conclude, “These fish are warmer than usual, clearly excited, therefore hap-py”?

Questions like “What is an animal thinking?” or “What does the world look like through their eyes?” have become central to research into animal senses. Building on this momentum, Um-welt: The Embodied World(s), curated by science and contemporary art curator Cheng-Wei Lin (Davey), opened this May at MOCA Taipei. 

The exhibition brings together nine artists who explore how humans might understand animals by attempting to see the world from the animals’ points of view rather than our own. Yet eve-ry attempt to “get closer” inevitably brings us face to face with the limits of a human-centered perspective, the influence of social norms, and the illusions of technological optimism. 

Let’s take a look at the first three works in the exhibition to catch a glimpse of these under-currents.

(Mis)understanding a Paramecium

In Life of Paramecium by Mark Wang, the artist overlays soap-opera-style narratives and mel-odramatic characterizations onto real microscopic footage of paramecia sourced from Dr. Chuan Ku’s lab at Academia Sinica. The work reflects our tendency to understand distant species through dramatized “docu-fictions” narrated through familiar tropes. Phrases like “ruthless predator,” “feasting on prey,” and “sharp reflexes” reveal more about our projections than the organisms themselves. So, are we truly getting to know the paramecium itself, or merely our own anthropocentric version of it?

(Limitedly) Approaching a Cat

In Extendable Ears, artist Sheng-Wen Lo uses a modified ultrasonic sensor to convert the fre-quencies cats hear into sounds audible to human ears and then wears the device non-stop for 30 days. This raises the question: Do the converted sounds truly represent what a cat hears, or are humans incapable, even with the most advanced translation tools, of fully grasping what it means to inhabit a cat’s sensory world? Notably, the artist chose not to present any of the converted ultrasonic sounds in the exhibition space—perhaps this decision itself holds part of the answer.

The Natural Pig and the Social Pig

“Sus scrofa domestica, commonly known as the domestic pig, is a subspecies of the wild boar domesticated by humans. It is a member of the suborder Suina in the order Artiodactyla of the class Mammalia.” 

That’s how Wikipedia defines a pig, but what truly makes a pig a pig? 

In The Three Little Pigs, artist Yu-chun Lo draws from extensive field research to document three socially constructed roles of pigs in human civilization: the meat pig, the ritual pig, and the pet pig. Biologically they belong to the same species, yet their fates could not be more different. Some are slaughtered at a set age, while others live out their days being pampered as pets. The contradictions at play in these parallel lives verge on the absurd—part joke, part philosophical reflection.

Other works in the exhibition explore themes such as tactile perception and the death sense in marine animals, differences in human brain interpretations under identical visual stimuli, un-conscious human biases toward pet species, the relationship between cancer research and lab mice, and humanity’s pursuit of stable environments for plant growth. 

The exhibition also features I’m Feeling Lucky by Timothy Thomasson, a Linz Ars Electronica award-winning piece, which probes how digital interfaces have become a uniquely human form of Umwelt. Unlike science, which pursues truth through rigorous observation, testing, and reasoning, art builds on the foundations of scientific knowledge to challenge our assump-tions and shake the boundaries of human understanding. 

Can we ever truly comprehend the lives of other species? Perhaps after experiencing this ex-hibition, we’ll begin to reframe that question—by first recognizing how vastly different their senses, and thus their worlds, may be.