Justin Caguiat at Serpentine South: Wall-destroying psychedelia

A decaying body made of bread lies crumbling at the opening while bells chime discordantly. On the walls hang psychedelic landscapes from which skeletons and skulls and falling girls emerge from the cosmologies; behind them, the walls of the Serpentine have cracked, exposing brickwork, wiring and more strange bread artifacts. What’s going on? It’s like walking into a cult ceremony in a squat where all the residents, through some stupendous ritual, have beamed up to Venus.

Multi-disciplinary artist Justin Caguiat – an American with Filipino heritage, though born in Japan - is interested in transformation wrought through destruction and rebirth. He chooses art over mind control or drugs to affect those who enter his spaces and this Serpentine South takeover turns the gallery itself into art, in a disorientating experience which rewards time and patience (much like quaaludes, actually).

He doesn’t turn the gallery into art by mere décor, rather the gallery engages with the art, and transforms it further, becoming an amplifier. The bells – the bells! – are in the shapes of flowers and seeds, and follow the English change ringing practice, where church bells sound in mathematical non-repeating patterns. Usually achieved by pensioners holding ropes, Caguiat has mercifully made them mechanical, responding to a score by composer Lily Pickett, but in a central space, called Hysteresis Loop, they trigger heating pads connected to copper discs covered in thermochromatic pigments. Still with me?

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. Courtesy Serpentine. Photo: George Darrell

Photo: George Darrell

Basically, the paint on the discs will respond to shifts in in heat and light, so when the bells chime and the light shifts in the room, the painting change before your eyes. At first you can barely notice it, and then it quickly becomes addictive (much like…), with the wires hanging down from these copper plates hung high on the walls making them feel like alien relics.

Throughout the rest of the gallery, bells on walls will follow the ever-changing pattern and ring out – often making you jump, so be warned those on dates trying to play it cool – giving a sense of not solemn holiness but of disruption and even death. For whom the bell tolls… and yet, death doesn’t seem like the end for Caguiat, more of a change of state. His bread body seems like a body rescued from, and turning into, rubble from a war zone. But it suggests sustenance and communion too. On a wall in another room, a bread angel is pinned to the wall, untreated, already cracking and decaying in the air. There’s a tension between holy desires and the realities of the flesh, resolved by a Buddhist sense of death as change not obliteration, despite the Christian overtones.

In fact the bread and wax totems littered about, a bunny, a hand, also feature a children’s TV character, the formal rituals of Christianity given new playfulness. You don’t need to put on your Sunday best, watching Sunday morning cartoons can be as meaningful a ritual. Later, in a small, almost hidden side room, an old-school projector plays a film which features the artist in locations around the world, playing with disguises in public settings, and playing kitsch-style with genres. It feels childlike, with that sense of wonder and possibility and glee in disrupting the normal drudge of things. That sense of excitement of life here gives this show a crucial lovability among the darkness.

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. Courtesy Serpentine. Photo: George Darrell

George Darrell

At its heart are his large unstretched paintings which hang from the exposed fittings of the ripped-apart walls. Made for a previous exhibition in Spain called Zodiac Machine, these are truly psychedelic works, not simply Grateful Dead peace and love tie-dye, but dense cosmos out of which disturbing scenes and figures emerge. Caguiat plays with science fiction in his work, and while these works look like realist works from inside the rings of Saturn, within their swirling fogs of suns and smoke, are images closer to Klimt. One is revealed to be a girl falling from the sky, Danae the dreamer falling through space and losing form.

Another densely gold and amber work reveals a skeleton form, as if Turner’s Death on a Pale Horse has found new form as it is absorbed and transmogrified beyond the grave. A blood-red boiling broth has giant eyeballs bubbling on is surface, watching and waiting for more forms to come from the miasma. See what you want, but apparently Goya’s The Disasters of War was his main influence, a series of prints showing violence around the Penisular War in the early 19th Century.

Who thought psychedelia would make a comeback? Well, if you go back to the early LSD days, when the search for new ways of being, new spirituality, new societies - the whole tune in, turn on, drop out mantra – it makes sense to seek new visions in a time hurtling towards a dead end. In coming to experience this show, there is a sense of it putting back the power in our hands, to stop being witnesses and imagine new ways of living. No drugs required, either.