Autumn in a Leaf
On PIXEL//FLESH

When the occasional cold wind begins to pass through New York, summer has not entirely disappeared. Sunlight still warms the skin, yet some leaves have already begun to fall, preparing to turn yellow and red. Looking at a single leaf, one can sense the change of season and, with it, a change in the surrounding environment.

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“A leaf is a screen that registers light, as well as a cybernetic element in a larger complex system.”

— T. J. Demos

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Wandering through LATITUDE Gallery for Ziyi Zhang’s solo exhibition PIXEL//FLESH, I kept thinking about this autumn leaf.

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Zhang describes her practice through the idea of “screen-native materiality,” a phrase that becomes tangible through close looking. Enlarged pixels dissolve across the surfaces, while the objects embedded within them retain an unexpected warmth. In 05/24/2024 chipped plate, the pink gridded surface recalls something knitted: loose traces of weaving, buttons, worn-out areas, and small irregularities that seem to carry an unknown story. Who did it belong to? What happened to it? The experience has disappeared, leaving traces of once being there.

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These traces become less stable as the object moves through Zhang’s process. An ordinary object is digitized, its familiar texture and function flattened into the language of the screen, and later returned to physical form on the clay board. During this journey, the translation never feels entirely smooth. Something disappears; something else emerges.

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Here, friction enters the work.

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Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes friction through the “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.” Zhang’s surfaces seem to carry precisely this instability. Objects, images, data, machine, and hand repeatedly encounter one another. Pixels protrude. Gradients acquire thickness. Images dissolve into texture. The apparent smoothness of the digital acquires weight, resistance, and skin.

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Such friction also resonates with the condition of objects in the Anthropocene. Objects move constantly through technological, economic, environmental, and visual systems. They are photographed, compressed, reproduced, consumed, displaced, and transformed. Every movement leaves something behind.

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Through this process, the meaning of “screen” begins to multiply.

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There are at least three screens at work. The finished work becomes one screen, registering the friction between digital and physical worlds. The digitized image forms another, carrying the object through flattening, translation, and abstraction. It also suggests a way of seeing the contemporary world, increasingly encountered through pixels and mediated surfaces.