Zhong’s work is also full of propositions. When her bigger forms (made with materials such as painted wood, plaster, or foam) are combined with others of smaller scale (a bit of string, grains of sand, tooth-size lumps of clay), the result may evoke a sleek hybrid product with technological capabilities. Or it may seem to materialize a Daliesque painting of spindly animals and off-kilter objects in a vast landscape. Indeed, Zhong arrived at sculpture through painting, and sometimes hangs a sparse oil-on-canvas rendering of her more commonly used forms in proximity to her work, offering another imagination of her world, an odd echo.

In a 2020 exhibition at Yale University (where she completed her MFA the following year), Zhong scaled up an orange bottle cork into a 7-foot-tall cylinder made from foam, and exhibited it alongside 13 actual corks scattered on the floor. On top of the tower, barely visible, was a small scene with, among other items, huddled clay-and-Plasticine forms on toothpick-like legs and a cut circle of wax paper standing on end. She also painted this scene, and gave it the title Button 003 (2020). But what this “button” might attach to or trigger remains intriguingly open-ended. Zhong likes to keep most of her objects unnamed.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.