Exhibition Review: Anchors in DISSOLUTION
This exhibition marks the third presentation of Project Wútopia. Artists Zeng Deyi and Wang Ziqianjointly present the duo exhibition Dissolving Anchors, using photography as their primary medium. Under the overhead lighting of the gallery walls, the works are quietly suspended through hanging installations, displayed side by side in close proximity. Between fragility and resilience, the images generate a subtle tension, slowly narrating the ongoing flow of life.
Upon entering the exhibition space, the first work encountered is Zeng Deyi’s Metaphorical Illness. In the image, the broken wings of a butterfly incapable of flight are scattered at the corner of a table. A half-oxidized apple stands atop a square cardboard shipping box, its exposed flesh pierced by a sharp, silver, curved object resembling a twisted ladder. The use of hard lighting lends the photograph a dramatic quality, as if freezing a moment from a theatrical scene. Within this suspended instant, struggles and metamorphosis of life subtly emerge: the butterfly appears to have undergone countless transformations, flying beyond damaged and fallen wings, completing a leap with the aid of winding silver threads, and finally hovering above the intact apple. The work constructs a tense balance between decay and continuation, allowing “illness” to transcend its conventional association with decline and instead become a metaphor for life as a state of continual reconfiguration and testing.
Born with a congenital heart condition, the artist has been placed under medical supervision and technological intervention since birth. In Zeng Deyi’s practice, the body is treated as a site repeatedly intervened upon, shaped, and inscribed by multiple systems. While it bears the fact of survival being sustained, it simultaneously exposes the anxiety and unease brought about by uncertainty, existing in a liminal state between endurance and collapse.
Moving further into the exhibition space, three adjacent photographs belong to Wang Ziqian’s work Eroded into Dust by Hidden Winds. This series originates from the artist’s acute awareness of the gradual fading of memories of her late grandmother. In the images, the grandmother’s portrait is printed on organic paper embedded with forget-me-not seeds. The blurred facial features are gradually overtaken by sprouting plants and fungal growth, which grow, spread, and eventually wither over time, progressively altering the original color and structure of the image. Photography is thus placed within an ongoing process, in which both image and material undergo transformation together.
Memories of the grandmother are reactivated in a manner closely aligned with the fundamental nature of life itself. Through the artist’s intentional intervention, the most primordial life forms in nature interact and co-generate with artificially produced images. At this moment, natural forces become a presence that resonates with the departed life. By introducing memory into an irreversible temporal process, Wang Ziqian’s work renders “dissolution” a continuously unfolding lived experience. As growth and decay alternate endlessly, this approach allows memory to be re-perceived and extended in a way that is attuned to the rhythms of life.
In Dissolving Anchors, illness and memory, body and nature, permeate one another under the sustained influence of time. Whether it is a body repeatedly intervened upon by medical systems or images gradually blurred through cycles of growth and decomposition, the works point toward a shared experience: the so-called anchor is not a fixed support, but a presence that is continually re-sensed in the process of dissolution. The exhibition invites viewers to linger within moments of change, to attend to those states of life that have not yet disappeared, yet have already begun to loosen.
—— Zhang Hui
