Jichi Zhang: if

Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456 is pleased to present Jichi Zhang’s solo exhibition: “if”, on view from December 12, 2025, through December 26, 2025.

Exhibition Statement

CAAC/ Gallery 456 is pleased to present “if”, a new solo exhibition by Jichi Zhang, conceived as both a philosophical continuation and a speculative rupture from his previous show “am.” In “am”, Zhang explored the fragility of becoming, using the verb “am” as a suspended, subjectless existence, a moment in which identity had not yet solidified. It was a murmur: light creases, trembling membranes, industrial skins half-wrapped in silence. am gestured toward meaning without declaring it; it held a stillness that almost but never fully spoke. But “if” does not speak. It doesn’t even whisper. It is not the next sentence after am. It is the sentence fragment left behind after syntax collapses. Where am still allowed for a kind of semiotic latency, if withdraws even the possibility of proposition. It refuses the sentence, refuses the structure, refuses the follow-through. “if” is not a hypothesis. It is a severe condition. This is not an exhibition of objects, but of pre-objects: translucent layers of abandoned skin, shattered industrial tape, half-oxidised residues that reject form, gesture, utility. These materials are not communicating. They are not “works.” They are things that have failed to become and insist on that failure. if is a speculative celebration of this failure. A wager on non-being. What if nothing needed to be something? What if the viewer was not a decoder but a variable? In this space, the exhibition is not completed through interpretation, but through unresolved presence.
This is not an invitation. It is not a question. It is simply: if.

Artist Statement

Jichi Zhang is concerned with temporary, post-industrial materials—used plastic packaging, plastic sheathing, and transparent industrial covering. These things, intended to hold or protect, are rendered purposeless and meaningless. In Zhang’s paintings, they are delicate conveyances of gesture, suspended in an unresolved tension between figure and decay.

Folded, pressed, or lightly arranged, the materials resist permanence. A crease may soften over time, and a surface may shift due to air pressure. His works are states of becoming—quiet, unstable, and open-ended.

Rather than force form onto the material, Zhang works in collaboration with it. Some pieces are barely touched, almost invisible against the wall; others are gently manipulated until they hold creases that feel like memory, accidental but persistent. The frosted surfaces blur the boundary between interior and exterior, visibility and concealment. These pieces are not didactic or symbolic; they ask to be encountered rather than interpreted. They trace states of hesitation, presence, and retreat.

His installations respond to space with subtlety. They do not dominate their environment but dissolve into it, activated by light, time, and proximity. A sheet may curl or collapse, a folded corner may tremble. This is not failure, but part of the work’s logic. Viewers are invited to approach closely, to adjust their pace, to stay with ambiguity. Zhang understands context as something more than physical—it is emotional, atmospheric, shaped by the conditions surrounding the work rather than fixed structures.

Recent works, am, pursues these concepts further. The title pulls one word from a sentence—am, no longer an action verb with an object. It suggests a state of suspended being, of being half-present. The works in am, like the word itself, are in a state of in-betweenness: neither formed nor undone. Zhang, in this work, approaches impermanence not as a moment of loss, but as a fundamental and generative state.

Zhang’s work resists the regimes of visibility, exhibition, and production. He is slow, quiet, and spectacle-proof. He adopts fragility as form and disappearance. He questions the structures of visibility, exhibition, and making. His work is quiet, slow, and resistant to spectacle. He engages fragility as form, and disappearance as a mode of persistence. The pieces do not present conclusions. They remain translucent, trembling, barely there, yet insistently present.

Artist Bio

Jichi Zhang (b. 2001, Hohhot, China) is a London-based artist whose practice investigates shifting states of presence and disappearance, fragility and persistence, materiality and ephemerality. His work spans installation, image-making, and writing, questioning how art can occupy vulnerable thresholds between existence and dissolution. Zhang graduated with First-Class Honours in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2025) and undertook a First-Class Erasmus Exchange at the Berlin University of the Arts (2024). He will begin his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

Zhang has presented solo exhibitions including am (Absent Gallery, Guangzhou, 2025). His work has appeared widely across Europe and Asia in major exhibitions such as ROTOR (Louvre Museum, Paris, 2024), ART COLLECTIVE: From the One to the Many (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024), Re-Activate (National Gallery, London, 2024), Abstract Image (Three Zeros Contemporary Art Centre, Beijing, 2025), and The Border of Cloud (Changchuan Art Museum, Suzhou, 2024). His works are held in collections including LAC (London), Atypia (Shanghai), and Liaoning University (Shenyang).

Through sustained practice across China, Europe, and the UK, Zhang has developed a body of work defined by its subtle engagement with transience, resistance, and non-permanence. His exhibitions at institutions such as the Louvre, Saatchi Gallery, and National Gallery situate him within a global dialogue. He continues to work at the unstable edges of artistic, philosophical, and conceptual inquiry.

Opening Reception: December 12, 2025, 6-8pm

Please contact info@caacarts.org for more information.

Gallery 456
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Chinese American Arts Council’s Gallery 456 Visual Arts Exhibition Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Gove¬¬¬rnor and the New York State Legislature.