The exhibition focuses on Piero Golia and Feng Chen’s shared engagement of on a regular basis objects, equipment, and components of movement. By perception-based experiments rooted in these elements, the artists problem typical understandings of bodily actuality, prompting important reflection on the authenticity of sensory expertise. Because the inaugural exhibition of Membership BJZ by ZIAN’s Beijing venture house, it additionally marks the second in-depth collaboration between the gallery and each artists.
On the core of Piero Golia’s follow is the notion of situational sculpture. His use of ready-mades con- tinues the Duchampian conceptual lineage, but introduces a pronounced sense of transience and per- formative intervention. In Luminous Sphere (2010), a five-foot-wide glowing orb put in atop the Customary Lodge in West Hollywood. Illuminated solely when the artist was bodily current within the metropolis, the work created a cryptic, poetic mechanism embedded within the nightscape—concurrently elusive and ironic. Golia typically attracts on remnants of previous works or life occasions, developing a self-referential eco- system through which new items operate as annotations, echoes, or continuations of earlier ones. His Comedy of Craft (2014), created for the Hammer Museum Biennial in Los Angeles, was structured as a trilogy of interconnected items.
On this exhibition, Golia’s new work In for A Penny, In for A Pound (2025) embodies these two core facets of his follow. It’s a reconfiguration from his earlier piece of the identical title, beforehand proven within the group exhibition Shake Rattle Rock Shine at ZIAN Gallery, the place a rock tumbler repeatedly pull- ing a hammer to repetitively strike one-cent Euro cash. By reassembling mundane objects in illogical combos, Golia constructs a self-sustaining system of absurd movement. This irrational meeting not solely subverts the objects’ utilitarian features, but in addition establishes a mannequin of notion lodged inside the fissures of actuality, pushed by mechanical repetition. Notably, In for A Penny, In for A Pound (2025) is conceived as a site-specific piece, tailored in response to the architectural circumstances of the Beijing house and its dialogue with Feng Chen’s work. This site-responsiveness displays Golia’s imaginative and prescient of artworks as open programs—at all times in flux, perpetually “unfinished,” and conscious of shifting con- texts.
Feng Chen, in the meantime, builds interactive and game-like environments through which expertise is used to reframe the banal. His follow, rooted in eager statement of the fabric world, repeatedly probes beneath floor appearances to interrogate deeper truths. In M, he deconstructs the mirror as a home object, reengineering it to unsettle ingrained habits of visible notion. As viewers strategy, a specifically designed acrylic mirror, actuated by mechanical elements, warps and distorts the mirrored picture. The curvature shifts in real-time primarily based on the viewer’s distance, making a refined overlap between the true and the digital. Feng’s new work Chronophobic Gentle-club continues this inqui- ry, utilizing low-cost, mass-produced gadgets to conjure a cosmic imaginary. Personalized lighting fixtures mounted on the ceiling simulate starlight beaming towards the ground, the place cameras report the beams and transmit them to screens within the gallery. But what seems on display will not be a celestial tableau, however the silent, unembellished operation of equipment in full darkness. This recursive gaze—observa- tion observing statement—extends Feng’s ongoing use of image-based media to discover temporali- ty. By this lens-device dynamic, he dramatizes the paradox of the seen and invisible, trans- forming mild, time, and notion into metaphors for existence and erasure.
Each Golia and Feng Chen make use of a minimalist sensibility and formal precision. Their mutual affinity for ready-mades and emphasis on geometric qualities lend the exhibition a visually austere readability. But beneath this restraint lies a persistent return to materials programs and their inside logic—a loop whose simplicity reveals its personal dependencies. Of their palms, the minimalist utopia turns into an open, con- non permanent system: one through which the assemblage of on a regular basis elements defies rational logic, evoking the poetic absurdity of lived expertise; and one which shifts consideration away from objects themselves towards the dynamic interaction between object, viewer, house, and time. Exit the Loop thus features as each an extension of the “much less is extra” ethos and an acknowledgment of artwork’s function as a conduit for vitality, info, and perceptual circulate.
at ZIAN, Beijing
till June 21, 2025
