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.
This is the third event in the 2025-26 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series – Psychedelic Reason. Generously sponsored by Asymmetry, this annual programme of artist talks, conversations and screenings provide 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 Institute; Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director at Asymmetry; and Dr Yayu Zheng, Asymmetry Post-doctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute.
Speaker:
Penny Yiou Peng (彭憶歐) is an interdisciplinary writer, scholar, and dramaturg based in Berlin, with roots in Beijing. Her work spans philosophy, performance, and ecological-sensing dramaturgy, engaging Daoist cosmology, critical posthumanism, ritual, and the archaeology of the senses. She examines how artistic and linguistic practices might reach the edges of perception and translate the ineffable into shared sensory experience. She holds a double BA in Economics and Film Studies from Smith College (USA), an MA in Film Studies from University College London (UK), and a PhD in Philosophy from the Institute of Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (DE) under the guidance of plant philosopher Michael Marder and theatre scholar Matthias Warstat. Her writing has appeared in Art Review, Spike Art Magazine, LEAP, Ocula, and Ars Electronica, among others. As a writer, performer, and dramaturg, Peng has collaborated on notable projects such as 500 Meters: Kafka, Great Wall, Unreal World (2017–2019) with Papertiger, premiered at the 2017 Theater der Welt festival; Trance (2021–present) with Tianzhuo Chen, premiered at Kampnagel in Hamburg; Here, a nut falls twice (2022–present) with Yen Chun Lin, premiered at the ICA in London; Seasons with Olof Rusten, premiered at Turteatern in Stockholm; Dwellers Between Waters (2023) with CROSSLUCID; and Shelf-life: an opera (2025) with Matilda Tjäder, premiered at Inkonst in Malmö. She is currently editing her book ‘On the Edge of Performance’ (2026/2027) and writing a bilingual science-fiction novel, On Earth in Dreams (浮世夢遊錄).
