“Antenna-tenna” is honored to announce the solo exhibition DENT by artist Stella, which opens on September 12, 2024 and will run through October 26, 2024.

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That much of Stella Zhong’s exhibition retreats to the periphery, if not hides entirely, speaks directly to the nature of her work. Sculptures a shade less than definable contain multitudes of closed spaces the totality of which can only be felt; through an obscure slit or over a gargantuan curve leaks glimpses of esoteric landscapes: infinitesimal objects that flit between the geometric and alive, even edible, drift imperceptibly. We enter a world built on the tipping point of physics, and so we are confronted with something existential—uncertain, ludicrous, far, simultaneous, dreadful, buoyant, never resolving.

Zhong builds spaces that consist only of “backsides”. Through engineered vantages, the viewer finds oneself again and again behind something, alone. The work—magnifying solitude and connectivity—refracts an undertone of the artist’s generational experience marked by distance. Yet at the root it foregrounds the instability of the negative, recalibrating smallness, secrets, silence, mischief, violence to the same plane as strength, alliance, wonders. Crouching down by High Pillow Worry Free, the viewer can peek into HIGH RISK, a video of a macaroni noodle singing while wiping off a fogged glass wall. Slowly cooked by the very water its job entails, macaroni bears the violence and uncontrollability of being that cannot stop it from creating momentary joy. Zhong’s bleak environments are often dented by specks and masses that appear both cute and alarming, whose indefinite position in turn subverts ours. To fall into Zhong’s world is to be playing and wrestling at once.

If incommensurable states blur in darkness, this work keeps us in the dark. Here are histories without time, consequences before cause . Here are infrastructures angled at real strangeness¹. Zhong likens her hyperbolic scale-shifts to pounding mochi : tenacity replaces distinction, entangled, unbreakable.

1.  Alex Bennett, “Real Enigma,” Flash Art, SPRING 2024, P.247, https://flash—art.com/article/stella-zhong/

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Stella Zhong（b. 1993, China）currently 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.

Stella Zhong’s sculptural environments are vast and stark, registered by scarcely visible objects in quiet chaos. Making tactile the cosmic and infinitesimal at once, Zhong’s acute scale-shift magnifies solitude and connectivity, refracting contemporary experiences—simultaneity, alienation, existential humor and uncertainty—shared yet ultimately incurving. Each of Zhong’s hermetic worlds is calibrated to a radical condition—like a particle accelerator absent of friction—to observe the revolutionary potential of smallness in one, in another, to feel hope and momentum in inert states.

Zhong has had solo exhibitions at The Intermission, Piraeus, GRC; Chapter NY; Fanta-MLN, Milan; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen; among others. Zhong has exhibited internationally at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; SculptureCenter, Queens, NY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Deborah Schamoni, Munich; Grimm Gallery, London/New York; Galerie Wschód, Warsaw/New york; Galerie Marguo, Paris; in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Peana, Mexico City; YveYANG, New York; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; HUA International, Beijing; and more. Her work has been reviewed on FlashArt, ArtAsiaPacific, Mousse Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times, Art in America, among others. Upcoming projects include a new commission by The Powerstation, Dallas, TX and Asia Art Society, Houston, TX.

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Antenna-Tenna

B1-7, 9 Qufu Road, Jing’an, Shanghai

Wednesday to Saturday 11:00-18:30