ROH is pleased to present Free-Range Suns, a solo exhibition by Stella Zhong.
From her first exhibition, Stella Zhong has made an impression in contemporary sculpture with uninhabitable environments of scalar, perceptual and temporal distortion, moving unexpectedly between empty expanses and cosmic debris. Her first exhibition at ROH, Free-Range Suns, presents exemplary works alongside experiments in new modes of production, anchored by a site-specific pavilion — Zhong's largest architectural intervention to date.
Zhong’s sculptures hold hermetic worlds, each of which reenacts and disputes the other. When viewed as a total constellation, an idiosyncratic object language emerges: one that must always be encountered at its most extreme, where presence and position must be completely assumed. In the company of these evasive objects — suspended by unknown forces or inaccessible within chambers — volatile existential and political conditions hum above visibility and silence.
These orbit around the exhibition’s homonymous work — an over-five-metre-tall structure with a gold glass façade in direct light. Zhong’s skyscraper is too large to be a model, too small to be real. Peripheral objects and a faint song enhance the lack of human occupation, further magnifying the personal and ontological. Tracing connective threads between experimental urban laboratories like Jakarta and Shenzhen (where Zhong was raised), her radiating pavilion reflects a particular ahistorical imagination, where human, object and environmental agencies become radically interchangeable.
This ambulatory journey extends into the exhibition’s accompanying publication, stella, designed by Kyla Arsadjaja and featuring essays and interviews by Sheau Yun Lim, CJ Salapare, and Martin Germann, contributing to Zhong’s abundant constellation: amorphous and free-ranged.
stella is available for pre-order.
ARTIST
B. 1993, China
Lives and works in New York, NY
Stella Zhong currently lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.
Stella Zhong‘s work brings together vast planes and particulate objects in idiosyncratic forms verging on the geometric, infrastructural, and at times, seemingly alive or even edible; her installation discloses only a sliver of this acute scale–shift, compressing layered contexts to the periphery. Engaging with physics, architecture, and personal, playful imagination, Zhong makes tactile both the cosmic and the internal, destabilizing definitions at every turn. She builds spaces precisely to break them down into somewhere metaphysical—often with a precarious placement, an inaccessible zone, a thin thread—in which centers shift and powers become unsettled: incommensurable states intersecting to create new histories.
Zhong has had solo exhibitions at Antenna Space, Shanghai, CN; The Intermission, Piraeus, GRC; Chapter NY; Fanta-MLN, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen; among others. Zhong has exhibited internationally at The Powerstation, Dallas, TX; Asia Art Society, Houston, TX; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Deborah Schamoni, Munich; Grimm Gallery, London/New York; Galerie Wschód, Warsaw/New york; Galerie Marguo, Paris; in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Peana, Mexico City; YveYANG, New York; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; HUA International, Beijing; and more. Her work has been reviewed on FlashArt, ArtAsiaPacific, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times, Art in America, among others.