Capsule 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?

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.

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.