The god is selfish and the trees are wise situates the body at the hinge of two allegories: the selfish god and the wise trees. The selfish god stands for forces that threaten to fragment and estrange the body. The wise trees, by contrast, figure endurance and transformation. The artists in this exhibition do not give form to the selfish god, but rather reveal how bodies—female, vulnerable, insistent—resist its force through gestures of hybridity and defiance.

Yujin Son and Camille Bernard reveal bodies of hybridity that arise through collision, dissolution, and merging. In Son’s earlier paintings, birds assumed the role long carried by the artist’s hand — a mediating instrument that makes the invisible visible, recording traces of her local community and translating its lived, often silenced histories into image. In her recent works, the birds have shifted their role. No longer distant chroniclers of the past, they turn inward, drawing close to her own body. This non-human gaze carries a certain strangeness: the self perceived as if from elsewhere, suggesting that subjectivity is always refracted through the eyes of the Other. In this fragile balance — between intimacy and estrangement, liberation and constraint — the body is transformed into a site of hybridity. These migrating creatures, whose very presence exposes the latent anxiety of a subject that is bound, now lay before us a body reborn, strengthened through the very openness of this encounter.

Camille Bernard’s painting generates new gestures of connection as figures drift through arboreal and aqueous fields where distinctions between self and other, foreground and background, begin to dissolve. Bound by tenderness and collaboration, Bernard’s figures rest, embrace, and nourish one another, enacting a body that finds strength through embrace. Here, hybridity does not simply blur borders but creates fragile communities of relation. Figures and landscapes meet as equal protagonists, entangled in a balance that is at once turbulent and sustaining. The “embracing body” that emerges is not idealized or harmonious, but porous enough to absorb indifference alongside care. Like the wise trees of the exhibition’s allegory, Bernard’s work imagines resilience not as solidity but as the ability to entwine, to endure, and to grow through entanglement with others.

Dimitra Liogka and Soo Hyun Lee resist the oppressions inscribed upon the body, disrupting established order by either exposing its wounds or consolidating strength through concealment. Their practices articulate gestures of defiance that operate through both revelation and withdrawal. In Dimitra Liogka’s paintings, the body refuses completed contours. Brushstrokes, dispersed like strands of hair, blur its form and leave behind traces that society prefers to dismiss. Rather than disappearing, this body persists by exposing what is unwanted, existing as a body of resistance.

In Soo Hyun Lee’s Daphne series, myth becomes a language of resistance. Daphne’s metamorphosis, once read as a powerless escape, is reimagined as an act of defiance: branches sharpen into weapons, leaves lure predators into traps, and the transformed body stares back without fear or shame. Lee channels her own experiences of violence and marginalization into these figures, turning what was once an emblem of victimhood into a strategy of attack. Vulnerability is redirected and converted into an active force. The body that conceals in order to survive now also strikes back — a body that transforms oppression into energy. Like this, the defiant body does not conform to ideal forms or norms. Instead, through acts of disclosure or concealment, it resists and acquires new vitality.

Hybridity and defiance operate in different ways, yet they converge in making the body a site of transformation. Through hybridity, the body dissolves boundaries and forges new relations; through defiance, it breaks norms and converts oppression into energy. In this process, the body—long subjected to discipline and control—emerges as a site of resistance and reconfiguration, of metamorphic imagination: hybrid, porous, and wise.