Preview: Tuesday, April 26th 5-8PM
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present undo undo undo, Vivien Zhang’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Zhang’s work demands a confrontation with the subjective ways that we attribute meaning and value, and the paradoxes of our digital information age.
Saturated both in palette and a plethora of possible interpretations, the artist’s latest series of paintings proposes new, alternative ‘landscapes’, albeit not in the conventional art historical sense. Rather, Zhang offers ‘topographies’ that unravel the many, often flawed, means by which we experience our world: geopolitical relationships, social contracts, and personal versus collective narratives.
Each painting is composed by interweaving diverse motifs and visual fragments, often sourced from disparate contexts. These colliding motifs generate a sense of fluctuation and ambivalence, against a backdrop of repetition and certainty.
World map projections, such as the Cahill Butterfly projection in Geogrid 2 (2022) and the interrupted Bonne projection in Geoindex 2 (2022), provide alternative representations of land mass – and the geopolitical hierarchies these may imply – to the commonly-used, but controversial Mercator projection. Other motifs include patterned matrices that simulate 8-bit graphics; ‘manicules’, the drawn hand shapes in margins of early manuscripts that served as highlighters as well as provenance signatures; mathematical shapes such as the Gömböc and the Reuleaux triangle, a curved triangle of constant width that can be seen in Compressed Bloom (2022).
