Taking Painted Skin (画皮) from Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异, 1766) by Pu Songling as its point of departure, the project examines the ‘monstrous feminine’ across Eastern and Western mythologies to investigate how bodies, skins, and boundaries become sites through which dominant epistemologies construct, regulate, and exclude forms of difference. Through encounters with the Liaozhai Zhiyi manuscript at the Austrian National Library and the collections of the Freud Museum in London and Vienna, this work employs reenactment, embodied reading, writing, and the production of a ‘failed copy’ of the manuscript to demonstrate how knowledge emerges through the embodied, material, relational, and processual forms generated through artistic practice, rather than institutional forms of knowledge produced through systems of representation, classification, collection, preservation and digitisation.