Mourning Skins: A Time-lapse Photography Series

By Yechun Peng, Yuanjin Zhao

Video & Animation

Mourning Skins explores the silent transformations of animal life under the relentless pressure of climate change, bridging the seemingly intangible phenomenon of global warming with tangible, visible shifts in animals’ skins and appearances.

By feeding an artificial intellegence system with papers on climate change and its effects on animal skins and appearances, along with datasets documenting recent morphological changes of specific species, the work prompts AI to imagine how species might evolve, or perish, under extreme environmental pressures. The result is a speculative yet haunting vision: a polar bear whose white fur succumbs to moss and floral overgrowth before decay; corals losing their vibrant symbiotic partners, bleaching, and crumbling into dust; a butterfly’s brilliant wings fading into charcoal and igniting into flame; and a snow antelope whose snowy coat fractures into brittle, stone-like camouflage.

Presented as if captured through time-lapse photography, the four moving images adopt a hyperreal, photographic style. Each frame compresses decades or centuries of environmental degradation into a minute of transformation, rendering the slow violence of climate change immediate and visible.

Through this visual compression, Mourning Skins seeks to evoke a deeper awareness of the irreversible losses unfolding beyond ordinary perception. It stands as both a lament for fragile beauty and a quiet warning of what may come — a world where even survival becomes a form of mourning.