Gary Zhexi Zhang (UK, 1993)
Residency period: May-July 2024
At La Becque, I developed initial research for a new non-fiction book project provisionally titled “Multipolar Technoculture”. The book is a collection of essays and fictions primarily based on fieldwork and research on emerging technological narratives in contemporary China and its global ramifications. As the center of gravity of research and production shifts beyond the West and the United States, which has significantly defined the arc of global technology over the past 75 years, the book explores how this story evolves within an increasingly multipolar world. Based on fieldwork and research, as well as personal narratives, the book’s five chapters will delve into topics ranging from bot culture to agriculture, ecological engineering to digital infrastructure and basic science. Rather than a mere shift in geography, it posits China’s globalizing technological production is driven by distinctive logic and drivers to those that shaped the technocultural condition we take for granted today.
At the residency, I developed the book’s initial framework, created a silkscreen series and published a zine, which sought to digest the framing challenges of writing about a historical slipstream while it is unfolding. — Gary Zhexi Zhang
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 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.
Gary Zhexi Zhang, La Becque, 2025, photo Matthieu Croizier
Gary Zhexi Zhang, La Becque Open Studios, 2025, photo Aurélien Haslebacher