Zhiyi Zhang

Thinking about the idea of secretly having fun without others noticing, of being invisible in the midst of a crowd, I step inside this entirely monochrome space, feeling dissolved yet whole. I am a peaceful, almost Zen version of a Lilliputian as I visit FLOHAUS Gallery’s latest exhibition, When the Background Takes Center Stage, by Zhiyi Zhang. Standing in the middle of the room, I am surrounded on every side by white. White floor, white walls, white light. For a moment, I lose the edges of where the architecture ends and the artwork begins. That, I suspect, is exactly the point of this space. The objects scattered throughout it evade their role as decorations on a wall. They have gained a kind of anatomy, pulled out, blown up, and slowly brought into attention.

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The first thing that catches my eye is an enormous light switch, roughly twenty times the scale of its ordinary self, hung at adult-eye level on the wall, painted the same monochrome white as everything around it, blending into the background while still standing out in its own three-dimensional shape. I have flipped a switch just like this at least thousands of times without once looking at it. It is an integral part of my room that I never actually think about.

 

My hand finds it by muscle memory while my eyes are already somewhere else. Here, in this space, this huge switch sculpture hangs isolated, no longer as a tool. The toggle is flipped on, as if it has taken over the role of the room’s actual switch, asserting its own dominance, even though no electric cord runs into it. I find myself standing in front of it the way I might stand in front of a portrait whose subject won’t meet my eyes. It asks nothing of me. It simply is there, being there, waiting, the way it has always waited, flipped on or off.

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A few steps away, a door handle curves out from the ground, rendered in such detail that it looks smooth and slightly worn, as if years of palms had pressed against it despite its being a sculpture. It is unsettling to see a door handle growing out of the floor, not to mention at this scale. I think of a door handle as a kind of in-between object. It belongs neither to the room one is leaving nor to the room one is entering. It simply doesn’t belong; it is a threshold. Scaled up like this, it loses its function entirely and becomes pure decor. The choice to place it on the ground almost lets me imagine pulling the handle and watching the ground open like a door, though my hand could only close around a fraction of its curve. I keep thinking of all the hands of visitors I’ll never know, who have touched it without anyone ever bothering to remember. Once it abandons its function, what’s left is no longer useful to anyone.

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This, I think, is the quiet but ambitious move of When the Background Takes Center Stage. It makes the familiar unfamiliar by stripping away its utility, and surprisingly, granting it more attention. Zhang removes these fixtures from the speed at which we normally encounter them. A switch no longer simply turns something on or off; a handle no longer promises access; a hanger no longer supports clothing. In that gap between glance and gaze, something surfaces. What exactly is left is for the attentive viewer, and the sculptures themselves, to decide.

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Walking back out into the ordinary-sized world, my hand reaches for the door handle on the gallery’s actual exit. Small and unremarkable, as it should be. But for the first time in a long while, I picture myself feeling it. It is metal, round, and smooth. It is also faintly greasy, with a metallic sheen. This is a new way of seeing the fixtures of the familiar, the ones that have been quietly present in your life the whole time, taking center stage.

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About the Writer: 

Shenya Yan is an artist and writer currently studying Visual Arts at Columbia University, based in New York City. She is a practicing artist who has held exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her practice and writing focus on work that examines individual agencies facing structural conditioning.