Non-Action 无为

Zheng, by contrast, elevates a document from her personal archive to the status of objet d’art, using three pieces of large paper to note the activities that constitute her art practice. We leave feeling a bit teased, wanting to see the drawings Zheng makes rather than merely the comment that she had a “good drawing day” on 10/11/25 or thought about “David Hammons” on 6/12/26. Chronicling periods of artistic activity, Studio Logs cleverly challenges the reputation of the readymade as not only low-effort but artistically lazy; Zheng seems to work in what Wallace Stevens calls the young poet’s “radiant and productive atmosphere.” Yet like Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, Zheng’s piece prioritizes conceptual intrigue over formal beauty. Throwing Zheng’s ordinary handwriting into relief, Friedman’s Everyday Drawing Calendar is frenetic, her kaleidoscopic palette veering sharply from the black, white, grey, and brown hues that, for the most part, dominate the rest of the show. Its materials list is a maximalist feast: fabric, foil, tape, pen, graphite, marker, crayon, etc. Everyday Drawing Calendar flirts with excess, though the piece does have its areas of splendid precision, including that little furl of wire mesh and a region of orange paint dots on a pink background.

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Other works at Non-Action 无为 take a more oblique approach to addressing the passage of time. We consider birth in front of Quin Mittelstead’s Ultrasounds (2) (2025), a splotchy black ink drawing on card stock; and death in front of Shannon Lai’s Returning… (2026), a wall-mounted installation of bovine and avian bones. Evoking processes of recursion, circles appear at other points in the show, like in Dust (2025), Cecilia Caldiera’s sculpture of three glass disks resting on glass cups; Carr’s Water and Root; and Anna Edelman’s Topography of Inevitable Change (2026). Non-Action 无为 invites us to spend time thinking about time: how it passes, and how we might pass through it with a lighter touch. I’m reminded of the saying “time is money,” and how engaging with art for prolonged periods of time could be considered, by some, a waste of both. Edelman seems to call into question that capitalist maxim with her sculpture Preen (2026), a feather constructed out of sewing and embroidery needles. Sharp enough to prick you or to patch a hole, its needles bring to mind labor, violence, and their possible overlaps. If it is true, as Oscar Wilde says, that “Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act,” we might ask what art inspires instead.

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Non-Action 无为 suggests that art inspires the kind of perceptual stillness cultivated nowhere more compellingly than in those aforementioned works on paper: Cho’s Where It Softened 눈에 보이진 않는 and Carr’s Water and Root. Chen has separated Water and Root in the gallery, hanging three other works on paper between them. Carr’s papers contain basic geometries—empty circles and four-sided shapes—carefully rendered in charcoal lines. Stuttering and flexing beneath Carr’s touch, however, these queer lines never quite achieve perfect straightness or consistency. At the top of Water, Carr half-erases two circles and the three lines they rest against, expressing with charcoal what it means to fade away, or abnegate; these are ghost marks, memories of form. Carr’s vision and revision in that semi-erasure; the sheer lightness of charcoal on paper; the temporal delay between Water and Root; and of course the restrained palette, all collide to “annihilate the desire to act.” As in Root, when a line turns downward and then stops, Carr’s drawings hesitate, a gesture that seems to typify wú wéi artmaking, and which we also find in Where It Softened 눈에 보이진 않는.

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Cho’s work is an all-white piece of 11x11 inch paper, to which she has added hair-thin embossments and two inch-wide, vertical bands of white glitter. The piece recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s monochromatic White Paintings (1951), which “reflect changes in light and the chance effects of shadows in the surrounding space,” as the Rauschenberg Foundation puts it. But Cho exercises more agency than Rauschenberg, explicitly directing shadows into her sharp indentations and concentrating light in her glittering strips. In its strongest moments, Non-Action 无为 refreshes our capacities for attention by imagining new styles of non-action, whether through gestural abstraction, the readymade, or the all-white object. Cho plays with restraint and the refusal of restraint: she limits herself to only a few elegant gestures, but also sprinkles dazzling party material onto the composition. We’re glittering, we’re glittering, and then we’re not: those shimmering bars stop about an inch before the bottom of the sheet. When I say the works in Non-Action 无为 invite perceptual stillness, I mean they not only permit this hesitancy, but urge us to pause and develop an enthusiasm for doing nothing, or at least for indulging in the ample pleasures of close looking.

 

David Egan is a writer from Altadena, CA and an English PhD student at Vanderbilt University. His essays and fiction have appeared in Antiphony Journal, The Adroit Journal, The New Criterion, Westwind Journal of the Arts, the Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival Anthology, and The Foundationalist. davidegan.info.