Across Neverland terrains, we catch a fade. Words break off its surface with the slimmest shiver, its occurrence a blink. A fleeting interloper of our solar system, the dustless interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is unseen forever — the first asteroidal form to appear in our orbit, utterly unbound by any star system. Tailless and melted by cosmic rays over time, the relic flashed ex nihilo as a rutilant flake of some ex-Pluto object. Beyond strata of order and below levels of perception, its fulgid visitation is said to have the shine of nitrogen ice. The astral drifts of these theories of origin are only middling states that slick the shores of speculative thought. That is, if ‘Oumuamua can illuminate anything, it is the displacing embrace of logic and alterity.
This messenger left a trail of dubiety to which, really, we can say nothing. Lonely harbingers, anomalies tend to disturb conditions of connection as they fissure the inexpressible, effecting temporary acceptance of futility in things forever unresolved. At times, to be without knowing is a relief, opening a space of thought without reason or resolve: to be with wonder and self-delusion in all its animating entropy. Already lost at its moment of sighting, ‘Oumuamua is of a future anterior. Observant of the (in)visibly weird that unsettles perspective, these real enigmas are a window for Stella Zhong, who probes the physicality of consciousness as spatial and dimensional. Her prepositional abstractions shelter particulate matter, little-creviced systems barnacled beneath, between, above, or behind armored forms. Throughout her work, atomized elements bear the attributes of dust motes, sea sparkle, dew droplets, hyphal filaments, or grains of rice, or else their energies retreat into hushed, unlit corners. The fluent ridges, angled geometries, and conch-shell folds of Zhong’s sculptures have a natant smoothness as though exfoliated over millennia, weathered by a darkling ether, made slowly soluble by an extrinsic coolant. Yes, muscled forms curl out of this water. Zhong’s cryptic, incurving volumes are future ruins of a failed modernity, shyly pollinated by a tiny schema that germinates at the closing folds of another time.
Aptly summarized as “a Wurtzian Cronenberg sort,”1 Zhong’s models, paintings, and videos organize relations across multiple, polarized scales to realize hypotheses for the future, convoking the galactic and atomic in one Delphic swoop. Suspended in an adjacent reality, the echo of worldly or even planetary familiarity is long withdrawn, eclipsed by deliberate hiddenness and unbreachable opacity. The solar eclipse, as Annie Dillard writes, undoes the world: “The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marks its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.”2 Yet this ambient sharpness is deckled by the “minor” articulations of Zhong’s attention to (sub) atomic life and infra-ordinary detail, offering a reflection on intimacy, transmission, and reliance that assumes a brilliantly outsized significance, the less-than-granular treated with renewed grandeur. That which exceeds understanding is where intrigue cannot be exhausted, and in Zhong’s concrescence of both that which is too close and that which is too far broaches a space that joins these hinterlands of extremity — the infinitesimal and the infinite — yet belongs to neither. It’s the connection. If the rift of the weird is an evanescent reprieve, Zhong’s compositions are their reserve, where they take root and roost under the tenebrous chill of a starless sky.
The midnight blue of her sculptural installation Rare Tilt (2023) sets an alliance with darkness at the tip of time – where alienation might feel at its richest, thickest. Zhong’s engagement with astro – and quantum physics here concerned the friction of the outlier – that which agitates matter and accordance. Three rounded rectilinear forms powdered an ashy petrol blue, figured spacey ventilation of vehicular aerodynamism, and refrigerated cool. (Feeling through with description, contouring with approximation, assigning with interpretation, it all ultimately beads of Zhong’s surfaces like quicksilver.) At its edge, a folded parabolic disc — a recurrent shape Zhong calls her “chips” which “bend the unbendable”3 of the hyperbolic paraboloid — describes a satellite awning whose painted texture offers a feathered, lunar glow. Its underside housed the video Loss of Coherence(2023), only viewable lying down and stowed beside a system of smaller forms: a grilled contraption wired to an oblong viewfinder that butlers a veined sphere and tin foil molecules that hover with shivering fission. An interest in the energy released when things are out of place is embraced in the handicraft of Zhong’s videos, displaying a willingness to interfere, to improvise, to create arrangements from a precursive sense of chaos. In Loss of Coherence, plasticine chips tremble as though magnetized, their small mounds collapsing among a loam of crystallized rubber. Shafts of light glare in starry cyan and palest yellow, a lambent orb, an impossible sun with a vertical horizon, a chip attached to thread dips into water, leaving ripples that might issue a sequence of other unseen currents.
That these confounding structures elude legible relations befits Zhong’s larger examination of agency, error, and chaos within atomic systems. In a conversation with quantum physicist Damon Daw, Zhong affirmed: “It’s interesting to me that while atoms are the smallest units of matter, they don’t necessarily provide us with a higher resolution of ‘reality.’ It seems to get weirder and more abstract the closer we look.” The deconstruction compelled by atomic thinking — such as spacetime and superposition — inspires a descent into even greater degrees of complexity. Zhong’s installations physicalize this murky sense of “resolution” to parallel the anomalous (un)reality of relations in and of space. This pitch of resolution — where future-oriented models of minor/magnificent relations scan as high-definition realms — concretizes a sense of time that is distinctly unplaceable. It is further complicated by the material choices, including foam, clay, plaster, string, and waxed paper, among others. These materials are handled with the flexible experimentation one might ascribe to virtual rendering or 3D animation, their protean forms and fungible lives contiguous with shortcut replication, distant fog graphics, and extravagant magnification4. Zhong’s achievement is to handle these lo-fi materials into forms that pivot from our reality, or else disengage entirely.5 Presence unseen yet sensed, a shudder, a buffer, a sudden breach in time — that quake of a concurrent reality that only transmits to ours partway. Much like a comet.
This blurry resolution was calibrated to an impression of unavailable exactness in Zhong’s solo exhibition “comet without a tail” (2021) at Chapter NY. About the ankles like a low-lying mist but opaque like a void, modes of viewing retreated, decentered by the gradual incline and total extension of a raised ground of seafoam green, shaded as through on the cusp of empurpling. Placing emphasis on the boundary of entering and exiting, Zhong’s floor declared its extraterritorial distance at the door. Sparse lacunae in this surface offered glimpses of subliminal, hypogean matter, figured by the sequestering of a few small sculptures whose sub-rosa energies remained pointedly remote. These discrete sculptures share in a fundamental distance yet are distinctly unalike: the patinated blue disc of (8, 2)E(-2, -13.5, 8) (2020) is crutched by a cavernous tapering volume; the lumpen boulder of BOnano1220∈(0.25, -8.25, -11.5) (2020) is sunken into an apricot isle, a tripwire suggesting a border, an interface, or a conduit for directional momentum; in another interstice, two mitochondrial bulbs nestle. Zhong’s lichen lamina yielded in other ways, as with a little whirlpool depression likening a zone of anomalous, cyclonic intensity. This detail found amplified resonance in Σ(79, 45, +/-2.3), (3, -1, -264), V26 (2020), a conical foam edifice at two meters tall that featured at its flat summit diminutive plasticine details, their shapes partly connected by a string, inciting synaptic sparks. Opposing Σ were five shrunken replicas of this totemic shape, collecting at the green incline’s ledge. With this atomized placement of forms and counter-forms, Zhong’s echo chamber of sculptures gathered a sense of latent logic perpetually obscured no matter one’s angle of analysis. The exhibition’s handout affirmed this, providing a diagram littered with exacting detail that appeared to trace these introverted streams: a plus symbol, a null sign, a flock of dashes, all an arrhythmia of encrypted activity. At this level of scrutiny, language is mere hopeful grasping, as Zhong maintains: “I think we can get pretty close to what something is with feelings but not with words. Math is also probably a much better technology in describing things.” Without resolve, the mind spelunks for nebulous intelligence, constellating tenuous alliances among parts that slip away, ever more unfathomable.
Seemingly void of narrative structure, “comet without a tail” conferred a distinct intermedial relation in Button 003 (2020), a painting with its miniaturized sculptural counterpart. Surveyed from a height, Zhong’s subject is depicted as a copper structure of mammoth proportion with a minute peak pinched at its circumference and a silvery structure plotted upon its plane, bending slightly. To the left, a division of copper clones is arranged in rows of four with one missing, this extracted by Zhong into three dimensions: one orange coin placed upon her planetary floor adjacent to the painting.
Painting, for Zhong, is a means to sketch that which cannot be imaged, creating “non-reality into reality,” while her sculptures encourage the viewer to “lose their sense of stability through concrete objects.”6 In this way, Zhong’s extraction of a painted element into sculptural form establishes an interdimensional tether that, precisely through connection, destabilizes both the painted scene and the sculptural setting, indicating geneses even further afield. The coin-as-device serves as a test or temporary solution for the painting’s fantasy, as though introducing an orbital force into a field of organized matter. Transferring an element of painted “reality” to concrete “instability” reinstates the primordial esotericism that issues Zhong’s delicate control. Button 003’s point of difference rears a vector of affect, meeting us in space with a manner utterly withdrawn and inaccessible yet insistently present.
This involution of immanence and transcendence hints at the problem of how to proportion that which resists perspective. Unmoored from fixed paradigms yet acclimated to the hypercomplex realm of physics, Zhong’s paintings — recently exhibited at Chapter NY (2023) — are tranced studies for prologues of possible universes, distilling agencies and latencies, cutting through gravities. Four spheres, each intricately marbled as though a result of graphical bump mapping, hover in respective corners of Synchronize Towards Indeterminacy (2023), another globe obfuscated by a shadowy scrawl flecked with orange scintilla. Each sphere appears differently lit as though indexing shifts in weight or gravity, their respective coloration indicating a process of deposition or sublimation. The thin panel of Button 013 (2023) is stretched horizontally, accommodating the strictest view of its planar disc that gleams with metallic sage green at its rightmost edge, a sphere of mineral, faraway blue balanced — secured or teetering — at its limit. Smaller oils on panels apply paint more abruptly, their surface more textural, and details more flittered. Another gray sphere occupies the lower right corner of There Is No Outside (2023), though whatever it might suggest as a capsule is irrupted by cobalt and mauve motes that swerve and stipple in a shower, lapping at its curve. Inside a particle or overlooking a tacit atmosphere, Zhong’s tracing of the unknowability of the world knocks into a post-anthropocentric ecology premised on nonhuman agency, suggesting a hauntological sensibility of teeming, cosmic sentience. Yet the paintings still spur the amplitude of the mind; magnetic, they accumulate: “So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts like fish, with clouds of net.”7
These conspiracies of form, scale, material, and dimension see meaning leap like deer into impenetrable mist. And so you let go. Something that has everything and nothing to do with nature: forest light furred in the wind; rain’s shimmering annihilation; the swelling strike of a sunbeam; the indefinite appeal of submergence in dark, warm water. The seismic psyches of surroundings that surpass a human dimension seem parareal, and yet they happen. Real strangeness that appears to pivot from elsewhere is, as Zhong’s reflections on atomic dimensions attest, everywhere at once. Her faintly animistic readings of quantum mechanics and outer space deliver a sense of wide-open responsiveness but an unconditional responsiveness that is also secretive. Utterly focused and utterly dreamed; open and closed; flat and deep.
It begins to read as a hyperstition. A compound of hyper- and superstition, the term describes ideas that bring themselves into reality in the future through the dynamics released via their expression in the present or past. It’s a theoretical fiction or a fictional theory, where a seemingly normal world is merged with fictional currents. Crucially, it’s the focus on the very process by which the real and fictional dimensions become blurred and involved. Like Zhong’s button, a fictional element makes itself effectively real; or like her paintings, behaving as if it’s real within a fiction full of memories, intuitions, and imaginations — it’s the perceived consistency of behavior that is persuasive, even if we do not know its ways. So, we blink and squint: “I can’t distinguish the fog from the overcast sky; I can’t be sure if the light is direct or reflected. Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint.”8
