Stella Zhong
In ancient China, pills for immortality were made by combining herbs with minerals or metals, believing that ingesting substances that last forever would make life equally eternal. In the shape of pingpong-like spheres, these pills often resulted in death. And it was in the quest for immortality that both gunpowder and tofu were invented accidentally. The simultaneity of galactic and internal times, of terror and hope, and their deviations are at the heart of Stella Zhong’s work. Zhong experiments with inertia, superposition, and topology as ingredients for immortality in a new series of sculptures, brought together in Inertia on an amalgam of a drop tower1 and a lotus platform2 – both technologies aimed for transcendence.
A fragment of an inverted cone multiplies and accumulates onto itself, some collapse, others shrink. A matte sphere fractures into two suns, while a stack of wedges keeps count. Slices of a circle remain frozen in a state of revolution. Each sculpture is an incommensurable constellation gravitated together by a shared orientation or a piece of frail string. While they evoke cosmic bodies, interfaces, and infrastructures, their geometry speaks of a perpetualness: like in cartoons, one never truly dies.
Zhong’s work turns objects into voids. Defying them are striking, ascending lines of parabolas. To follow them almost requires holding breath not unlike anticipating the eventual plunge riding a drop tower. As though probing for more oxygen or to make contact with someplace higher, these lines pierce through the stillness of the voids so new, small ecosystems begin to emerge. Over an edge and at the foot of a sculpture, a bundle of rice, a tiny yolk, a shard of the host structure itself quietly proliferates.
The Greek Ikaria island planted an early idea in this work: a land once flocked with political exiles and a population now known for its longevity. The work is as much about divergence and regeneration as it is about the inertia of optimism that gravity or chaos cannot impair.
Stella Zhong (b. 1993, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Zhong has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY; Antenna Space, Shanghai, CN; The Intermission, Piraeus, GRC; Fanta-MLN, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen; among others. Zhong has exhibited internationally at SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galerie Marguo, Paris; in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Peana, Mexico City; YveYANG, New York; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; HUA International, Beijing; M 2 3, New York; and more. Her work has been reviewed on ArtAsiaPacific, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times, Art in America, among others.
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1. Amusement park ride involving a central structure and a gondola lifting riders to its top before releasing to free-fall, experiencing weightlessness.
2. Elevated, ritualistic platform on which ancient Chinese alchemy, including immortality experiments, would be conducted.