STELLA ZHONG
Chapter Gallery New York, January 05 - February 06, 2021
Stella Zhong featured in Days No.3, Summer 2021
A humble yet seismic event took place in early 2021 at the Chapter Gallery in New York’s lower east side: Stella Zhong’s exhibition ‘comet without a tail’ was a remarkable and distinct experince created by this exciting new-generation sculptor. By equally deploying architecture, painting and installation, Stella gave the viewer a glimpse of the status of sculpture today - regardless of where the artfiorm has been previously - and refreshingly, without any speculation of where it is going in respect to technology. If anything, one could argue technology was implied at any time and everywhere in an almost virtual, dramatic use of scale and plasticity.
Stella Zhong, ‘Comet without a tail’, 2021, installation view
Stella Zhong, ‘Comet without a tail’, 2021, object
This is work that intutively and somewhat playfully pushes the extremes of digital nativity as part of the artists’s subjective palette; free of any objective, conventional expressions of technology for the masses. Therin lies this work’s overall superiority in comparison to many other contemporaries. As we moving through a carefully curated mini tour inside the small gallery space scale becomes the main driver of our experince and it keeps drawing us deeper and deeper in. What appears first as a sparce room with just one large cylindrical object at it’s core soon reaveals a microcosm a small and smaller sculptures in the floor, on top of the cylynder in corners and along creases. “Am I forgetting somthing? Did I see it all, Should I look deeper?” Like in our everyday lives in an increasingly virtual world, we are not sure where the details end and where the overview starts. That’s where we we become unsure what makes a comet...its volume or the velocity of its tail? (MH)
Stella Zhong, ‘Comet without a tail’, 2021, details
Stella Zhong was born in Shenzhen, China in1993. She holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an 2021 MFA candidate at Yale University. Solo presentations include Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn; Weybosset Gallery, Providence, RI; Hunter College, New York; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China. She has participated in group shows at Essex Street Gallery, New York; ZH Projects, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn; Paris School of Art, Paris