Ningyo (人魚)
ROBIN HUBER & MILANO LIBERI

“They invite the gaze of one who looks upon nature with curiosity, reverence, and some fear.”

Ningyo takes its name from a figure in Japanese folklore: a creature part human, part fish. Unlike the fairy-tale mermaid of Western imagination, the ningyo is stranger, more animal, and indifferent to human concerns.

The series explores the unstable territory between human and nature. For Huber, the ningyo embodies elemental power: it is raw and wild, fundamentally unknowable. Huber herself is the figure in this series. The figures are nude, but they do not invite the male gaze. They invite the gaze of one who looks upon nature with curiosity, reverence, and some fear.

Shot across Sardinia, Maui, and California, Liberi’s photographs capture the intricate dynamics of light, water, and the body in motion. Where Huber brings visual poetics and narrative imagination, Liberi brings a direct, embodied sensitivity to pattern and movement. Water becomes an active force, transfiguring the body into something fluid, ambiguous, and otherworldly. The images reveal remarkable physical precision while resisting conventional interpretation.

In post-production, Huber amplifies selected gestures and expressions, revealing the strangeness latent in the images. Elsewhere, she deepens the obscurity through layers of starfields, kelp, and sediment. The resulting images reach beyond artifice toward a heightened encounter with nature.