Gray Area is pleased to present Spider Lily, the debut solo exhibition of Gray Area Cultural Incubator members falsework studio (Matthew Doyle + Yuehao Jiang).

Spider Lily is a cinematic adventure game set in a liminal afterlife reimagined as a wastewater treatment plant. The game world draws from the Chinese underworld, 黄泉 (Huangquan, "Yellow Springs"), but reconceives it as an intricately engineered water system designed to guide each soul toward rebirth. In Buddhist teachings, death unfolds as a multi-stage process where the soul escapes the physical form. When entering purgatory—the intermediate state—the soul passes through those same stages in reverse. Inspired by this conception, Spider Lily's purgatory is organized vertically, with each stage serving a function in returning the soul to the material world.

Players navigate this afterlife as a Lost Soul. On the shore at the game's opening, the Lost Soul encounters a fish whose eyes are being pecked out by ravens. This image establishes the game's core relationship: the Lost Soul and the fish are two halves of a human being. The Lost Soul is a hungry ghost—wanting, grasping, attached—a vessel that mirrors the player's own desire for progress, knowledge, and the sensation of "winning." The fish, by contrast, is the "true" soul: nonverbal, non-possessive, closer to perception than ego.

Spider Lily treats guidance as its central mechanic. Rather than controlling a hero, players escort a fragile other through a system that exceeds comprehension. Throughout the facility, statues mark thresholds, each containing a tide pool that cradles the fish. The fish functions as a living key—able to open sealed doors and activate transformations inaccessible to the Lost Soul alone. The architecture of the afterlife is thus organized around care: passage requires protection. After all, the spider lily is a flower associated with guiding spirits toward rebirth according to Buddhist mythology.

What Spider Lily ultimately conveys is simple and unsettling: the fish is an imperfect mirror reflecting your own capacity to care, to pay attention, and to love. In this way it resembles any of our dearest attachments—a dependence on a person, the care extended to a beloved animal, an object we can't let go. The play here is in service of an emotional ecology where loss, trust, judgment, and transformation become mechanical as well as spiritual processes, asking how games might offer new mythologies for the relationship between the living and the dead.

This exhibition kicks of Gray Area's 2026 season of AGENCY, defined as the capacity to act in the world, exert power, and shape the future. Spider Lily reminds us that agency is born from interdependence: it is the ties that bind us that also enable our collective power. Learn more here.

Gray Area Opens New Gallery Space August 25, 2022 with Inaugural Exhibition

We're thrilled to announce the opening of the new Gray Area Gallery on August 25, 2022, a permanent exhibition space located within Gray Area's current home in the MIssion District's Grand Theater.

Gray Area was originally launched in 2006 by Founding Executive Director Josette Melchor as Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) to showcase technology-driven art. The Gallery transformed into the Gray Area non-profit in 2008, and exhibited works by seminal new media artists including Casey Reas, Aaron Koblin, Camille Utterback, and STAMEN Design. During this time, the space quickly became a cultural community center, developing notable civic engagement programs activating communities to respond to local urban issues, and expanding with educational programs, research, and live performances.

The new Gray Area Gallery continues the tradition of making genre-bending work accessible to the public. In tandem with broader Gray Area thematic initiatives, the first year of gallery curation will center on the complicated tensions and surface areas between identity, representation, expression, oppression, and technology.

Where We Live? - Steven Piasecki & Michael Meisel (July 2022)