Ang Ziqi Zhang
What I Want
February 9 - March 9, 2024
Silke Lindner is pleased to announce What I Want, Ang Ziqi Zhang’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and in New York. Ang Ziqi Zhang’s small to midsize panels in soft hues and bold neons take shape within a constant push-pull relation that creates spaces between abstraction and subtle figuration, desire and control, rational and affect. Ang Ziqi Zhang recalibrates. Evoking both tensions and balance, the majority of her panels in the exhibition is composed of diptychs. Their counterparts are paired side by side, rearranged and broken up again, often expanding onto unusually elongated shapes.
Investigating semiotics of Western Capitalist consumer society through a subjective lens of her own understanding and interests, the base structure of her paintings often develops by incorporating signs, symbols, diagrams and language. Through calligraphies, word ladders, ancient Chinese oracle bone scripts or ‘Exit’ traffic signs, Ziqi Zhang applies language as image and tool. Other paintings originate in abstract thought, technology or visual references of everyday experiences that lay the foundation for her multi-layered paintings. Comparing her own painting process to that of Photoshop, she traces, stains, rubs and erases until the layers ultimately flatten, their order rendered indiscernible. Her intricate use of technique and color offers a multitude of reference points, challenging the viewer’s eye to reassess with every line, color and knit it traces. Sheer films, metallic paint and fluorescent streaks, loops and gestures dissolve into a play of translucent colors and shapes. Light and blissful, like strobe lights moving through a nightclub, the paintings draw parallels to Ziqi Zhang’s engagement in club culture and her affinity for techno and electronic music.
In a system fueled by an infinite loop of desire, Ziqi Zhang searches for meaning by testing the limits of control, defying her own rules. Letting go of the thoughts that shimmer through the layers, her paintings transform into sensory experience where “the top layer does what it wants”.
Ang Ziqi Zhang (b. 1994, Brampton, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in May 2023. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Iowa, Brooklyn; LVL3, Chicago; and Produce Model Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Chapter, New York; Derosia, New York; Jan Kaps Gallery, Cologne, Germany; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Good Weather Gallery, Chicago; Night Club Gallery, Minneapolis; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; Each Modern, Taipei; and Fonda, Leipzig, Germany; among others. Ziqi Zhang will have her first institutional solo exhibition at Neuer Essener Kunstverein in Essen, Germany, in the fall of 2024.