Chapter NY is excited to present Stella Zhong’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, and first exhibition of paintings.

Zhong’s work suspends existential uncertainty and humor. Through large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and painting, she builds vastly empty spaces punctured by barely visible, nonconforming objects in the periphery—highly idiosyncratic worlds that disorient authority. Immersed in physics and nonhuman elements, her work uses obscurity and lack of reference as the condition to observe strength in smallness, latent life, and moments where alienation and intimacy converge.

Like her sculptural work, Zhong’s paintings display vantage points calibrated to both cosmic and microscopic scales. Spheres, desolate corners, grains of rice, buttons, cliffs, and reflective filaments are subjects that she repeatedly and almost obsessively paints into her characteristic muted environments, as if inside a particle or above the atmosphere. Visualizing incongruent spatial relationships is integral to Zhong’s practice, in which she experiments particularly through painting.

In this exhibition, the constellation of new works refract Zhong’s personal lens of global shifts and entanglements, and turn to humble yet tactile connections. In one painting, a monumental sphere gravitates towards a minuscule mote to exchange shadows; in others, entities of decidedly different dimensions intersect in a soft, playful touch. The objects foregrounded here are at once potent, helpless, and isolated, but never quite alone.

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. Selected solo exhibitions include Chapter NY, New York; Fanta-MLN, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen. 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; 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.