@theretheirtheyreshow @ba.design.gold
18-22 JUNE 2026
Unit 8, 133 Copeland Rd, London, SE15 3SN
Unit 8, 133 Copeland Rd, London, SE15 3SN
Selenophilia
Sandy Jiao
Selenophilia explores how myths are rewritten by history, and how scent can become a way to enter the gaps that language and images cannot fully hold. Beginning with different versions of the Chang’e myth, the project follows the female figure as she shifts from sacred agency to domestic morality. Rather than treating these changes as errors or inconsistencies, the work sees them as the real story: a record of how cultural values move, disappear, and return.
In its new stage, the project has developed through a collaboration with perfumer Debra Gerson to create Lunar Dust, a perfume that conceptually mimics the smell of the moon. The scent is not meant to be a scientific reconstruction, but a speculative translation: dry, mineral, distant, and intimate at once. It asks what it means to remember a place most people have never touched, and how smell can make myth feel physical.
The work belongs neither fully to history, nor mythology, nor perfume. It came into being through their overlap: ancient story, sensory imagination, and collaborative making. In this sense, Lunar Dust is not only “my” scent or Chang’e’s scent, but a shared atmosphere—something carried between the moon, the myth, the perfumer, and the audience.
In its new stage, the project has developed through a collaboration with perfumer Debra Gerson to create Lunar Dust, a perfume that conceptually mimics the smell of the moon. The scent is not meant to be a scientific reconstruction, but a speculative translation: dry, mineral, distant, and intimate at once. It asks what it means to remember a place most people have never touched, and how smell can make myth feel physical.
The work belongs neither fully to history, nor mythology, nor perfume. It came into being through their overlap: ancient story, sensory imagination, and collaborative making. In this sense, Lunar Dust is not only “my” scent or Chang’e’s scent, but a shared atmosphere—something carried between the moon, the myth, the perfumer, and the audience.
| Mythology |
| Olfactory Studies |
| Nose |