Gary Zhexi Zhang (UK, 1993)
Residency period: May-June 2024
Living and working between London and Shanghai, Gary Zhexi Zhang is a visual artist and writer whose work explores systemic connections between cosmology, technology, and the economy. He operates individually or collaboratively with organizations using a variety of media, including installation, film, performance, writing, and teaching, and conducts research within the framework of cultural institutions and think tanks.
He recently published Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), a book of fictions, essays, and interviews about finance and time, while Dead Cat Bounce, the opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and has been touring in 2024. In 2024, his solo exhibition, METAMERS, was presented at EPFL Pavilions and he exhibited in the 9th Asian Art Biennial, Taichung.
He has taught as a lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths MFA, a PhD external examiner at the RCA, and adjunct lecturer at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he also co-founded the design studio Foreign Objects.
At La Becque, Zhexi Zhang will aim to spend time researching the foundations of a new book of essays and fictions tracing geopolitical, ecological, and cosmological narratives through emerging technocultures of contemporary China and beyond. Comprising five chapters set in different temporalities, it takes a descent into the strange lives of bot farmers, pig farmers, influencers, basic science researchers and other practitioners making their way through the technological realities of an increasingly multipolar world. As a response to the irreconcilability of the present, these multi-scalar narratives aim to scramble the historical sensorium held in place by the American Century, and explore how our intuitions of techno-futurity, political legitimacy, planetary metabolism and psychosocial normality are being reconfigured before our eyes. Alongside this, he will be working on an upcoming commission, a simulation work revolving around a community of NPCs living in a mall.
Gary Zhexi Zhang, La Becque, 2025, photo Aurélien Haslebacher