Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, On Lake Taghkanic, 2024, handwoven cotton, 67 7⁄8 × 41″.
Five cotton textilesby Miranda Fengyuan Zhang took viewers on a trip up the Hudson River, out of New York City, past the Catskills, and into Canada. Marking a subtle departure from the artist’s previous weavings—which feature more boisterous palettes, biomorphic forms, and unruly threads fuzzing out from their surfaces—the works in Zhang’s exhibition at C L E A R I N G, “You can always tell when a lake is coming up, because the mountain would start looking blue,” appeared cool and aloof, serious and unsentimental. On a wall to the left of the gallery’s entrance was On Amtrak Along the Hudson River (all works 2024), a piece that depicts a row of aged fluorescent lights inside an airless tunnel. Owing to the perspectival succession of right angles describing the underpass, which lent a sense of severity and order to the composition, and to the slightly wavering handwoven lines of gray, blue, purple, and yolky yellow, On Amtrak evoked high speeds and anticipation—a claustrophobic commute preceding the hike and the swim.
Zhang’s works seemed to obey their internal grids while retaining a pleasantly all-too-human arrhythmic quality. In spirit, they had more in common with the wan, postcardlike aesthetics of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs than with the geometric designs of Anni Albers’s modernist textiles. In the five-by-three-foot On Lake Taghkanic, the largest piece on view, one found an insinuation of the blue mountain mentioned in the show’s title. It was presented as a series of flat-gray triangles, clipped and refracted across three registers, which seemed to absorb the cool tones of the teal threads bearing down on them from the edges of the picture. Displayed like a triumphant memento from Lake Taghkanic, a state park in the Catskill region, the image of the peak was angular and austere. Yet it also seemed to be fading into the atmosphere, eager to disappear. The charcoal-colored boulders in an adjacent work, Mountain Var. III, were likewise fragmented, their scattered parts occluded behind vertical bands of plum and peach. What united these landscapes was the sense that they were observed not by a seasoned camper with a love for nature, but by a vacationer who dutifully traced the top of a range with her eyes before looking down at her watch. These works embraced both the sublime and the workaday in equal measure, shuttling cleverly between the two competing modes of life and feeling.
Lakes appeared in two other weavings, Young Glenn on Lake Simcoe and A Pathway on Water. The former is a tribute to the unorthodox twentieth-century classical pianist Glenn Gould, whose summer home was located on the titular site in Ontario. In this piece, Zhang placed a tricolor seed-shaped form, perched like a diver on the edge of a floating plank, in the center of a checked and striped picture plane. She then split the abyss around it down the center, raising the left half of the composition ever so slightly above the right, extinguishing any pictorial illusion of depth. In the latter, a dark narrowing path—shaped like the long shadow of a wine bottle—extends over horizontal bands of liquescent teal and sandy brown toward a fortress with a semicircular gate. Where one would have expected to see the lake depicted from the shore, Zhang captured the view of someone standing on the water, glancing back at the land and the edifices constructed upon it. All throughout the exhibition, walls and vistas were properly conflated: The great outdoors seemed to have been swallowed up by the great indoors.
