In ‘Machine(s)’, her first solo exhibition at Layr, Wuyishan-born, Chicago-based artist Leah Ke Yi Zheng continues to confront the standard function of canvas as passive assist in works whose bodily form is integral to their that means and whose mutable, translucent surfaces are imbued with an almost-bodily presence.
By stretching silk over handmade picket frames to create irregular, parallelogram-shaped helps, Zheng transforms her work into delicate, sensuous objects. Not like the substantial layers of paint that accumulate in conventional oil-on-canvas works, the artist’s acrylic-on-silk approach embraces a mix of brush management and fluidity, as the colourful pigment seeps into the silk slightly than resting on its floor. On this means, Zheng’s work don’t merely maintain a picture; they take up, stain and register traces of her each motion. The result’s a floor that doesn’t assert its materiality as a strong airplane however, slightly, behaves like an interface: porous and reactive. This side is especially evident in ‘Machine(s)’, the place Zheng suspends two of her works, Untitled (Machine) (2024) and Untitled (2025), in mid-air. Seen from each side, and positioned simply half a metre from the big storefront home windows of this ground-floor gallery house in a former shopping center, these work work together with shifting mild, shadows and reflections all through the day, additional reinforcing their unstable, nearly-animate high quality.
Oscillating between illustration and abstraction, Untitled (Machine) and Untitled (Machine) (2025) depict what look like geometric compositions of thick horizontal and vertical traces. The previous, positioned on the window, encompasses a pale red-yellow palette of acrylic on silk over a pine stretcher, whereas the latter, created with two layers of silk over a cherrywood stretcher, is veiled in a light-green hue with shimmering yellow tones. Incorporating ideas from the I Ching (Guide of Modifications, c.1,000–750 BCE), an historical Chinese language divination system primarily based on the non-linear logic of yin-yang dualities and transformation, Zheng adopts the hexagram motifs to speak a set of interpretative meanings. The greenish-yellow Untitled (Machine), for instance, options hexagram 49 – the image for revolution.
Within the bluish Untitled (Machine) (2024), a thematic fusion takes place: barely noticeable at first look, hexagram 55, the image for abundance, seems within the background, joined by a satellite tv for pc with an antenna-like machine. This picture attests to Zheng’s ongoing fascination with early fashionable know-how and its mechanical parts. The primary machine-like type to enter her inventive vocabulary was the fusee; a conical wheel utilized in vintage watches to control their motion. The shape seems all through this exhibition in numerous iterations – notably within the extra figurative and vividly vibrant Untitled (2024). Right here, two fusees combine with patches of color that seem and dissolve alongside summary silhouettes, one resembling a phantasmagoria, making a dynamic composition. Barely off-balance in its parallelogram format, the work appears to be searching for its personal equilibrium.
As Carl Jung defined in his 1949 foreword to the English translation of the I Ching, ‘occasions evolve one out of one other’ through the ‘diametrically opposed’ ideas of causality and synchronicity, which he describes as both a linear chain of trigger and impact or as an interconnected coincidence of occasions in house and time. In Zheng’s work, layered contrasts and refined shifts embody each ideas concurrently. Inviting viewers to look past the floor into underlying buildings of actuality, whether or not guided by logic or probability (or each), her works counsel that sense will not be merely to be deciphered however should even be felt and skilled.
Leah Ke Yi Zheng, ‘Machine(s)’ is on view at Layr, Vienna, till 10 Might
Important picture: Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Leibniz’s Machine, 2024, acrylic on silk over mahogany stretcher, 47 × 93.4 × 4.7 cm. Courtesy: the artist & Layr, Vienna; {photograph}: Kunst-Dokumentation.com
