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2025.12.12 - 2026.03.13

Zhang Miao: Liminality

The Rehearsal Project: A Solo Exhibition Series
  • Duration
    2025.12.12-2026.3.13
  • Opening hour
    Tuesday - Sunday 10:00-17:30
  • Address
    Taikang Art Museum, 1F Taikang Art Museum, Building 1, Yard 16, Jinghui Street,Beijing Taikang Group Building
  • Artist
    Zhang Miao
  • Curator
    Xin Yunpeng

For Zhang Miao, “art is not a representation of the existing world, but a way to let the world open up for the first time in a certain manner.” In his works, the boundaries between colors are employed with extreme restraint to dismantle “perspective” and register depth within the two-dimensional plane of the canvas. He further uses actual physical depth to modulate the accumulation of color, preventing the viewer from settling into any stable spatial order.

In his work Epoch, Zhang Miao draws on Hejduk’s Nine-Square generating exercise and materializes the logic of architectural axonometric projection, granting equal visual authority to all faces. When this originally paper-bound, flat logic is transformed into an aluminum-alloy installation with physical depth, the viewer falls into a “vertigo of dimension.” This visual “ambiguity” is precisely the “landscape” Zhang Miao intends to evoke. Another work, Eyelash, is embedded within the physical boundary of space. As an extremely thin “interface,” it delineates inside and outside on transparent glass. As the title Liminality suggests, art here becomes the threshold of perceptual transition.

Zhang Miao’s works, grounded in a “vanguard undertone,” respond to the contemporary ethical problems of painting, reflecting the era he has lived through. Today’s reality has acquired a harder, secular shell and has grown increasingly fragmented in the new century. Kitsch, carrying “traffic,” wins a total victory in its new guise, while the disillusionment of the avant-garde utopia informs Zhang Miao’s grasp of artistic “liminality.” What is negation? Only by negating the forms society expects can art endure. What is transgression? Only by crossing the boundaries set by history can art persist.

The Rehearsal Project invites Zhang Miao as the artist for its final edition in 2025, commissioning a new work in anticipation of the beginning of a new year.

Other Information

  • About Artist

    Zhang Miao (b. 1985) In an additive thought process, Zhang Miao accepts contradictions and deliberately reintroduces obsolete aesthetic elements and mixing the flat and the three-dimensional against the communicative demand for clarity. Compelled by Robert Venturi’s eclectic views on architecture, he embraces a complex, heterogeneous art. To look at his work is to feel the contradictions he has fused; whether it is a flat form of architecture, or a humorous, decorative object that expresses the innermost spiritual longing. His recent works combine the meta-narratives of art making process itself with seemingly uneventful real-life; the humorous physical construction in space, the metallic semi-reflective surface as well as its ambient illumination are all incorporated, organized and meticulously controlled by the indiscriminate power of color perception to create a dreamlike physiological “light” under which a restorative sensual awareness can take place. Zhang Miao lives and works in Beijing, China.

  • ABOUT CURATOR

    Xin Yunpeng，graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s degree in Art in 2016, Xin Yunpeng has been engaged in contemporary art practice since 2007. He currently lives and works in Beijing. His works mainly take the form of installations, videos, and site-specific projects.
    Recent solo exhibitions include The Winds Howl Cannot Silence the Grass (MouMou Space, Beijing, 2024); Multi-Minds (Gravity Art Museum, Beijing, 2023); Simultaneous (de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong, 2022); and Friendship First, Competition Second (C5CNM, Beijing, 2020).
    Selected group exhibitions include Zhilan: A Glance in Urban Garden (X Museum, Shanghai, 2024); STUDY II: Natural History, Alternative Knowledge and Deep Learning (ShanghArt, Beijing, 2024); Engaging with the World: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Since the Dawn of the 20th Century (Taikang Art Museum, Beijing, 2023); and M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story (M+, Hong Kong, 2023).

INSTALLATION VIEWS