Art Basel Hong Kong
Stella Zhong’s sculptures provoke a distinct sense of displacement, clashing vast planes and granular objects in hyperbolic scale shifts. Her installations disclose only slivers of obscured worlds, transposing inclusion, alienation, simultaneity, and disjunction at every turn. Engaging with physics and architecture, as well as food and personal history, Zhong’s work refracts layered existential and political conditions that speak to entanglement, interiority, and humor.
The works on view expand from a video opera projected within a sculptural screen titled Warp Until Fearless (彎到無所畏懼為止), a form akin to futuristic structures, spatial graphs, and a bow-window typical of Zhong’s hometown. The protagonist of the opera—a macaroni noodle inspired by skyscraper window cleaners—sings and wipes a fogged glass wall while slowly being cooked by the very water its job entails.
Zhong—from a generation with firsthand experience of the peak of China’s urban development—is particularly interested in sites that hold both dread and dreams simultaneously. The sculptures negotiate city features of transparency and elevation marked by impenetrability with moments of softness and connectivity. Dotted across the surrounding walls, clusters of clay—or “sticky rice”—form an orbit evoking the Milky Way that the artist recalls still seeing in Shenzhen’s skyline in 1999. Zhong’s metaphysical work stretches the built environment between extraterrestrial space and food, recalibrating that which is beyond reach and that which is to become internal.