"When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom."
Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947)
The world we see is not the world as it is, but the world perceived through our emotions, through our desires, like those bodies without organs so dear to Artaud and Deleuze, which are those that our mind recomposes, a world that accords with our desires.
An organless body is not a physical one. It is the body that humans compose for themselves in accordance with nature. It has no organs because it is a unity with everything that surrounds it. It is like the chemical precipitate of all the components of its external environment, the mental projection of its fantasy, an image of its perfection.
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A World Without Us
Text by Colin LedouxCapsule Shanghai is thrilled to present a Viewing Room of A World Without Us, a solo exhibition by Miranda Fengyuan Zhang currently on view at our gallery until February 27th, 2021.
Magnifying familiar traditional techniques through the union of knitted wool and cotton fabrics, Zhang’s work deals with her familial history of undoing woolens to form new ones and wielding processes of centuries-old weaving methods. Incorporating strange shapes, warm colors, and soft materials with poetic sentimentality, the work depicts lush universes made of deserts, flowers, glaciers, and animals as renditions of the human psyche and emotions.
The equivocal title A World Without Us rests in an ambiguous space that signifies the artist’s style. What is a world without us? Is it a world of natural disasters threatening us to disappear or one congested with digital mutations distracting us from our natural relationships?
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On an intimate level, “without us” echoes the idea of a lost love – consequences of a complicated relationship between humanity and nature. The works on show play with our perceptions, leading us to depths of our inner worlds. We can hardly tell if they are really landscapes from elsewhere or visual translations of personal feelings. The landscape and physical surface remain tangible, but at the same time lure viewers into her mysterious worlds.
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A Weed is but an Unloved Flower
A Weed Is but an Unloved Flower 凛凛, 2020A Weed is but an Unloved Flower sounds like the title of a poem, and it is, indeed, a poem. Taken at surface level, the piece reflects superfluous plants, but perhaps under a different set of circumstances. A loved weed may become a flower. The paradoxical metaphor of qualifying weeds with flowers proposes the claim that all materials are equal. Indeed, the visual poem connects our sensations to our cognition in swinging constantly between understanding and feeling when confronted with nature.
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The Wild Tulips
The Wild Tulips 野蛮的郁金香, 2020The Wild Tulips is knitted in one piece, like a jumper or a blanket. Stretched on a frame, it becomes a surface and an image. It highlights and enhances the shapes we see: strange polygons, sparkling waves of heather colors, plain geometry, and atmospheric tonalities oozing around while droning grayscale pillars jut upwards from below.
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Zhang’s curious narrations synthesize different sources of vision, emotions, and cognizance harmoniously. Employing a similar narrative technique as in La Belle Captive by René Magritte and Alain Robbe-Grillet as they compose a unity from multiplicity through juxtaposing standalone, concrete images and text, Zhang draws portraits of her emotional nature unlocked not only through visual absorption, but also what we feel and read – freestanding experiences that subsequently meld. Like a mysterious code, these three different perceptions (vision, emotion, and cognizance) brace us to unravel hidden treasures unscrambled through personal responses.
Playing with viewers’ desire to give meaning to adjacent articles, the work without a title is optically abstract, and the title without the work is narrative. The works allude to line, color, texture, and temperature while the titles evoke places, situations, and sensations. Together, they seem to represent a virgin nature hollow of human presence. The symbiotic relationship leads viewers to combine these elements as if they were deciphering an enigma. Through the titles and rhythms of abstract compositions, the surface transforms into a still life or landscape, but in-between the title and eye that looks at the image lies a world of cherished stories.
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When Cabbage Leaves Roar
When Cabbage Leaves Roar 嘎嘣脆, 2020In When Cabbage Leaves Roar, the entrancing void of dark, earthy green recalls a Calla Lily or wolf’s head. Deformed grids of paint-like drips drift from above and grow from the bottom. A long splash of hairy orange divides the image diagonally. Have you ever seen a cabbage roaring? It is when the leaves are detaching themselves from the cabbage – they’re roaring. Acting as leads, the yellow and green become cabbage leaves, thus containing the still life of a cabbage.
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The materials in the work give a memorial dimensionality to the whole. Using materials that would otherwise form the sensitive membrane between body and the outside world, Zhang’s works envelop viewers softly like bedtime stories. Wool, an emotional material with mellow and warm notes, is a material we have formed simple relationships with as a material we sleep and live with daily. It correlates to our memories and emotions in considering our past and history through threads of family and innate senses. It tempts our will to touch, transmits temperature, and connects to our deepest sensations of skin and intimacy. Using reminiscent materials within free and formal compositions, Zhang shares internal feelings reflected in the world through the eyes of typical materials.
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A Night in the Desert
A Night in the Desert 一夜沙漠, 2020As our gaze focuses on the wavering points of sharpness and muted gray fields of color blurred like remembrances, the emergence of warmness like bees humming and spectral movements in a hazy night sky invite viewers to peer into A Night in the Desert. The atmosphere is disturbed only by the sharpness of a line glowing in neon green light that burns in the frame like a retina persistence of a memory.
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Waterfalls Lily
WATERFALLS LILY 妙”水”生花, 2020In Zhang’s woven works, the artist balances the constraints of taming vertical threads (warp) interweaved with freedom on the horizontal (weft). The abstractions depicted demonstrate a rule that Zhang constrains to and breaks. The quality of inventiveness in Zhang’s laborious working process is transparent in the organic forms in Waterfalls Lily. Following the restraints in the weaving process, Zhang succeeds in creating a piece that breaks with the rigid lines ruling the loom, allowing viewers to enter inwards and outwards of the elegant water. The waterfall is like a wave of freedom built on a solid grid.
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In Felix Guattari and Gille Deleuze’s book, Thousand Plateaus, a chapter titled “The Smooth and the Striated” uses the making of textiles as a metaphor for our relations to rules and laws. The weaving is the striated space, organized and ruled, as opposed to felting, which is infinite in its possibilities. Weaving requires strict calculations and functions in a restrictive environment of structured mathematics that Zhang breaks by following her soft narrative and intuition to construct organized worlds.
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The Joy Underneath
The Joy Underneath 酝酿, 2021The Joy Underneath represents a world where silhouettes of poplars resembling human contours are caught in a storm of colors that could have come out of the books of H.P. Lovecraft, and is seized like a geological section in which animated life-like subsoil bulbous roots are enveloped in an invisible gas or liquid substance exuding pigment as it escapes. It is simultaneously a representation of nature that questions the visible world as an experiential experience of existing in, contacting, and being swept away by natural elements. The representation of intense organic activity is bursting with free forms and colors.
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Budding Wildly in the Spring Air
Budding Wildly in the Spring Air 春风吹又生, 2020As part of this poetic ensemble, Budding Wildly in the Spring Air explodes in shades of watery blues that luminously glow around buds standing proudly on their stems. The rigid framework in the repetitive technique of knitting induces a trancelike state that allows color to guide the artist’s hands intuitively, resulting in pieces that appear disorganized, wild, and free.
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Pebbles
Pebbles 鹅卵石, 2020In Pebbles, Zhang contradicts rules further by adding “pebbles” that agitate the foundation of linear vertical lines.
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A Pond
A Pond 池塘, 2020This double articulation further extends to A Pond, which dichotomizes suppleness and precision. Freedom opposes rules yet the two naturally cohabit the same space.
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With her subversively joyful and resonantly colorful art, Zhang offers viewers a familiar and reassuring vision of a world without us – of a world where everything has to be started over. If melancholy sometimes emerges from her work, Zhang addresses viewers as if from one bank to another. The sturdiness of emotional fragility is revealed to embody an interstitial, fragmentary vision of a world through the striated space of weaving and knitting not as it is but as it is seen, felt, and integrated.
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Miranda Fengyuan Zhang 张丰渊Around the Dry Valleys 在空谷, 2020hand woven cotton 手工编织棉布162 x 282 x 144 cm
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4 Friends
4 Friends 四个朋友, 2020The worlds are familiar yet mysterious. Sigmund Freud coined unheimlich (the uncanny), a disturbing strangeness explaining the perturbing nature or accustomed affinity towards phenomena that is subsequently tacitly pervasive throughout Zhang’s color fields. 4 Friends participates in this dimension of being clear representations of what is announced yet the familiarity remains open as if to direct our gaze to near boundaries of sensitivity.
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Miranda Fengyuan Zhang 张丰渊
Miranda Fengyuan Zhang was born and raised in Shanghai. She lives between New York and Paris. Zhang has had solo shows at Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai), Half Gallery (Shanghai), Halsey McKay Gallery (New York), and Dear Rivington (New York). Other exhibitions include: Mendes Wood Gallery (online) and Chambers Fine Art Gallery (New York). She has been the recipient of the La Maison de l'Art Contemporain residency in Asilah, Morocco and will be an upcoming resident at the Arquetopia Foundation in Oaxaca, Mexico.
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Worklist
Miranda Fengyuan Zhang: A World without Us -
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PRESS
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It's Nice That | “I want to show what I have seen”: Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s woollen paintings are based on her memories
May 20, 2020 The Shanghai-born and New York-based artist uses coloured woollen threads to weave in moments from her past – a process that takes at least a week to complete. For some,... -
Miranda Fengyuan Zhang on Daily Lazy
February 15, 2021 -
Miranda Fengyuan Zhang on Contemporary Art Daily
February 24, 2021
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