Ritual of Repeating Insubstantiality

Opening Reception: January 26th, 2024, 5-8pm

From nighttime skincare routine to daily meal preparation, from second-to-second breathing to annual ancestral veneration ceremonies, human beings are enveloped in rituals of repetition in their most celebratory or minutest form. Embedding the story of repetition with cultural and philosophic perspectives, the exhibition invites the viewers to contemplate their roles in a story of never-ending repetition. As (in)voluntary guardians, documenters, and onlookers of repeating rituals of insubstantiality, Chi Zhang, Crys Yin, and Qiaosen Yang unravel their shared entrapment by convention, habit, context, and time.

Despite their unattainable promise of forever beauty and youth, beauty products emerge as a life necessity worthy of recurring usage. In The Youth Project - Skincare Facial Masks (2018 - ongoing), Chi Zhang presents her used masks, along with their original packaging, as haunting testimony to her ongoing routine of applying facial masks for 15 minutes every night. Collected over five years, Zhang’s masks constitute a series of self-portraits once in contact with, yet now detached from the artist’s body. Zhang also preserves her second-to-second memory of breathing New York City on a given day in her New York City Air Project (2018 - ongoing), where she pairs a sealed bottle of New York’s air with an annotative documentary photograph.

With a sense of nostalgia in the air, Crys Yin’s Untitled No. 1 – 10 (2022) references traditional Chinese ancestral veneration ceremonies while contemplating individuals as the (un)conscious inheritors of long-lasting rituals. After experiencing several passings during the pandemic, Yin revives and represents her childhood ritual of burning joss sticks as offerings in grief. While the lighting and refilling of incense signify a prospering sustenance of lifeline (香火 in Chinese), its fate of ephemerality parallels the cyclical nature of individual narratives. Yin’s The Red Group, Everything is Exactly the Same (2019) also illustrates a juncture where individuality collapses into a vortex of sameness.

In the monolithic face of time, are repetitions reduced to movements of futility? Qiaosen Yang’s sculptures transform the supposedly hefty ceremonial objects into a fleeting collective of motion, symbolic of the passage of time. Both grasped and ungraspable by the everyday repetitive structure, collective cultural memories and traditions transport themselves into fleeting motions and individual histories. As its titular phrase suggests, Yang’s Another End in the Looping (循環中的另一個端點) stands as an abstract representation of time’s inexorable flow, repeating people’s memories and desires.

By re-enacting and re-examining events of repetition, the exhibition embraces repetition in its fullest form. As the most disposable and ephemeral materials (facial masks, incense, air) seep through our everyday repetitive structure, they speak to both the existential mundanity and significance of human experiences.

The programs of Chinese American Arts Council and Gallery 456 have been supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs along with many other friends.