Zhiliang Zhao at Lulu

Artist: Zhiliang Zhao

Exhibition title: Partition

Venue: Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico

Date: December 18, 2021 – February 19, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Lulu, Mexico City

Lulu by X Museum is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Chinese, Shanghai-based artist Zhiliang Zhao.

A partition wall has a certain power. While it only takes a few extra steps to penetrate its protection, a partition becomes powerful in its withholding and silence: to the would-be intruder, a suggestion of hidden information, and the intruded upon, a sense of privacy and security. The relationship between a body, a partition, and the space that contains them forms immediately and stays in flux as they change positions.

The artists and their audience similarly negotiate power dynamics. Making and exhibiting art is an alluring yet revealing and hence vulnerable practice. If understanding creates power, silence is a protest to reclaiming an equilibrium. Silence demands effort from the spectator. Mosaics create such silence. As if looking with eyes squinted, one encounters the information on a mosaic via its aura and possibilities; a perception continues to be suspended or finally roosts on one answer or another.

The process also manifests in the objects an artist creates and the immediate and productive potential they form with those who enter them. The body is invoked without being visually referenced. “Stool (pornographic doppelgänger)” (2021) is a concrete caste of the space underneath a plastic bath stool. While the negative space under the stool is conceptually open for occupation, the cast grants it objecthood and a potential for physical interactions. “Don’t Catch Feelings,” (2021), a light-box made of an acrylic fly trap, lurks and preys: its color and luminescence attract and trap insects who enter, land, and over time, take over. Often taken in bathrooms and bedrooms, a nude image is not only an invitation to occupy a body, but also a copy opening to the most intimate spaces of one’s life. The light-box extends, faintly, an invitation to bodies that intrude. One kneels down, as one walks around a partition, for a promise and reward.

Zhiliang Zhao (b. 1996, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in Shanghai, China. Recent exhibitions include (2021) USB Multi-Port Linking Exhibition, Qiao Space, Shanghai; Rituals in Rituals of the Future II: Cow Bell, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai (2020) Meeting Point III: The Unanswered Question, AM Art Space, Shanghai, China; Motionless Capture, Studio Gallery, Shanghai, China; THere, Studio Gallery, Shanghai, China; Pure Beauty, BANK, Shanghai, China; Sanitized Bodies, Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019).