Painting addresses time more radically than photography because it conveys relatively little sense of the temporal setting of its depiction. This has been all the more the case since the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural wings ramped up the dynamics of process’s trace in lieu of the illusion of depicted time. Ang Ziqi Zhang’s painting is heavily invested in such questions of painterly temporality, which have accompanied the medium as background noise since the invention of technical representations of reality. Traces of color rubbed into wood and subtle gestures dominate the surfaces and read as remnants of fading signs that have been blurred by the passage of time. Ziqi Zhang combines the use of temporal markers such as trace and gesture with various forms of the representation of time – numbers, clocks, graphs, spirals, wheels – which sometimes depict their subject in purely abstract, sometimes linear, sometimes circular ways. In turn, the painting synthesises these forms in parts, whereby the motifs, if you want to call them that, approach each other and meld into one another. Consequently, different spaces of (painterly) time are realized. Another characteristic of Ziqi Zhang’s works is a glow reminiscent of screens that emanates from them. This creates a kind of picture tube that lends the paintings a peculiar dimensionality, which is also fused with the painterly depiction of time. Ziqi Zhang skillfully plays with this space by interpreting it in medial-technical, spiritual or metaphysical terms, without one of the spheres overriding the others. The careful, cautious elaboration of the surfaces on the one hand and the suggestive depth effect on the other result in a push-pull agency that throws viewers back on themselves by forcing them to constantly realign their bodies with the works. Against the background of such a personalized reception framework, the small gestures and manual traces on the pictures may be read not only allegorically in relation to the eternal passage of time, but also as careful offers to use the sensual surfaces as a gateway for a drift into one’s very own emotional territories.
Ang Ziqi Zhang (*1994, CAN/US) lives and works in Brooklyn. She studied at the University of Chicago and the Yale School of Art. In addition to numerous participations in group exhibitions, she has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Iowa Projects, New York; and Produce Model, Chicago. The exhibition in Essen is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition.
