News/Upcoming (last updated 4 October 2023)
- July:
Tickets for Dead Cat Bounce at Somerset House for ONE NIGHT ONLY on July 14 are on sale now! Tickets are sold out!
- May: Presented an installation version of DCB at Medialab Matadero as part of OpenLAB.
- 06-21 April: I will be on a residency at Medialab Matadero, and preparing for a performance at Medialab's new festival, Open Lab. Lmk if you are in Madrid!
- April: We (me & Waste Paper Opera) have just wrapped up a first week of rehearsals for Dead Cat Bounce at London Performance Studios.
- March: Talk and project review with students of (Meteora) in the Hovestadt Chair at ETHZ
Ongoing Things
- Kings x Somerset House: Countermapping the Hostile Environment w/ Lu Canzutti (KCL/SecurityFlows) & Migrants Organise
- 2022-23 R&D fellow @ Rockbund Art Museum
The Recent Past
- Commission Launch: The Tourist @ AGYU Toronto
- Workshop: Rupert AEP, Vilnius
- September Book Launches: Rupert & CAC, Vilnius with Tautvydas Urbelis; After 8, Paris with Yuri Pattison & Benjamin Thorel; San Serriffe, Amsterdam with Metahaven & Merve Bedir
- Book Launch: Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023) @ GOLDSMITHS JUNE 11
- Teaching: Cybernetics and China with Mi You, The New Centre, session one here.
- 2022-23: lecturer @ Goldsmiths MFA, Fine Art, Critical Studies
- Group Exhibition: Katabasis, or Cartographer in the Underworld @ totalab Shanghai, curated by Julian Junyuan Feng, April 2023
- Talk: Art & Economy @ documenta Institute, May 2023
- Talk: The Greater Fool Theory @ chelsea college of art, May 2023
- Teaching: Casco Institute, COOP @ Dutch Art Institute
- Talk: Earth day in-conversation with Sougwen Chung and Asad Raza for Gaia Art Foundation and Ignota Press
- workshop @ Masters Institute of Visual Art
- Talk: Sync or Swim @ Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art & Curating
- Publication Launch: Future Art Ecosystems 3: Art x Decentralised Tech. FAE3 was co-authored by Gary Zhexi Zhang and Victoria Ivanova, and produced by Eva Jaeger and Serpentine R&D Platform. Launch event here.
- A contribution to Symposium: “Cohesion was meant to hold. But reality started to slide.” Diann Bauer — An Appreciation
- Group exhibition: Liquid Ground @ UCCA Dune
- Teaching: "Catastrophe Time!" workshop series at Goldsmiths MFA
- Screening: Dead Cat Bounce exhibited on As We Leave The Window Open as part of Liste Art Fair until October 13.
- Talk/Curation: Where is the Planetary @ HKW, "How Can Habitability Be Measured"?
- Talk: Presentation @ Oslo Architecture Trienniale as part of The Ledger of the Sun, organised by Jamie Allen
- Talk: Conversation with Jeffrey Shaw as part of Para Site's Art and Technology talk series
- Premiere: Dead Cat Bounce w/ Waste Paper Opera @ Somerset House
- Talk: Financial Worlding with Caroline Woolard as part of Strategies for Re-worlding at Trust, Berlin
- Talk: Industrial Food Textures and workshop w/ Agnes Cameron @ Schloss Solitude
- Teaching: Visiting Tutor and "Scam Magic" workshops at Goldsmith's MFA
- Podcast: "What is Financial Astrology?" with Alannah Chance @ Somerset House Studios
- Solo exhibition: Cycle 25 @ Arts Catalyst & Bloc Projects
- Digital Artwork: The First 10,000 Years w/ Agnes Cameron @ Arts Catalyst
- Group exhibition: The Principle of Hope @ Inside Out Art Museum
- Group exhibition: Liquid Ground @ Para Site
- Group Exhibition: Rehearsing the Future @ Alien Art Center
- Group Exhibition: Death Ray on Coral Island @ Power Station of Art
- Online screening: Parasite (物流) @ Douglas Hyde Gallery
- Talk: White Papers on Dissent @ Van Abbemuseum
- Group Exhibition: Further Experiments in Art & Technology @ NEW INC & Nokia Bell Labs (as Foreign Objects w/ Eliza Collin)
Recent Writing (2021-)
- Profile on Max Planck ICARUS project for Interspecies, LAS.
- "Into the Lumpy World", LEAP, Summer 2023 issue.
- Catalogue essay, Chando Ao (upcoming).
- "Unravelling the World in the Polycrisis Era" for Frieze #235.
- Future Art Ecosystems 3: Art x Decentralised Tech, co-author with Victoria Ivanova (Serpentine, 2022)
- "The Internet of Egregores" for Singapore Biennial, on the invitation of Aarti Sunder (upcoming)
- An introduction for Michael Ho's Jerwood FVU Commission, Echoes from the Void
- "Repressed Returns" in Incomputable Earth - Digital Technologies and the Anthropocene (Bloomsbury, upcoming)
- Trojan Horses" in ART PAPERS Spring 2022
- "Never the Same Ocean", Schloss Solitude "Mutations" Journal, in correspondence with Ittah Yoda.
- "Jenna Sutela: Sonic Metabolisms (interview)" in Sonic Continuum (Nottingham Contemporary, upcoming)
- "Anicka Yi: ‘I’m Very, Very Squeamish With Culture'" (interview) in ArtReview, October 2021
- "Propositions" Harun Farocki Institute & Journal for Visual Culture
- “Sinofuturism and its Uses”, VERGE Journal of Global Asias
- "Ponzi Scheme", Weird Economies
- "World on FIRE", Gaia Art Foundation
Misc Links
Collaborations/Connections
- Co-founder/fry cook at Foreign Objects
- Resident at Somerset House Studios
- Intermittent collaborations with Agnes Cameron
- Occasional but committed relationships w/ Waste Paper Opera, Trust, Sakiya, O.W.L., Weird Economies, Serpentine Arts Technologies, Other Internet, Complex Earth, AICA
- Ex: NEW INC, p/t lecturer @ Parsons, Berggruen Institute, Delfina Foundation, Wysing, MIT ACT
Bio
- Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer whose work explores connections between cosmology, technology and economy. He was born in Suzhou and works in London. He recently edited a book of fictions, essays and interviews about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). The opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, Dead Cat Bounce, premiered at Somerset House in 2022. His last solo exhibition, Cycle 25, documented events that blur the boundaries between speculative belief and the material world, like natural disasters, scam nations and cosmic economies. Recent group shows include Katabasis, Totalab, Shanghai; Liquid Ground, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe & Para Site, Hong Kong; The Principle of Hope, Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing.
He is a Lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths MFA and taught previously at Parsons School of Design. In 2023, he will be an R&D fellow at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. His writing on art, technology and economy have appeared in Frieze, ArtReview, Verge Journal of Global Asias, Journal of Cultural Economy, MIT Journal of Design and Science, among others. Recent/upcoming books and chapters include Against Reduction (chapter, MIT Press, 2021), Incomputable Earth (chapter, Bloomsbury, upcoming), Platforms: Around, In Between and Through (Singapore Biennale, 2023); Future Art Ecosystems III (with Victoria Ivanova; Serpentine, 2022).
Links