The Modern Bestiary provides a fascinating, accessible and humorous insight into the wonders of the natural world. Tracing one family's history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood. Mother takes the two children to China to look for him, resulting in a less than happy family reunion.

This exhibition, the first ever dedicated to the bestiary, gathers together more than a hundred works from institutions across the United States and Europe, including one-third of the world’s surviving illuminated bestiaries. But the content in this book…I can take gore, and scenes of blood, but for whatever reason, this book was really bluntly focused on details of bodily functions and strange metaphors of the same. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. And from this fable, we have the image of the sun and the moon, the living and the dead, a cycle that repeats itself, opposites with the same roots, and blood and that everything is alive. The myths and stories are like gravity, binding the hearers to their mothers and helping them find their roots.It definitely pushes the boundaries and expectations and I can always appreciate a book that challenges our anticipations.

But, while this was an interesting story and beautifully written, was so unnecessarily over the top gross and grotesque. He is currently completing a book of creative critical 'chronicles', and preparing translations of Guillaume Apollinaire and Roland Barthes.The stories popularized through the bestiary continued to influence natural history texts and images well into the sixteenth century. There are a lot of very heavy themes tackled here such as finding cultural identity in an environment, not of your ancestors, sexuality, poverty, and generational curses. The story is a generational saga, following a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, switching back and forth between their POVs as the story unfolds.