Unanswered Call
Duo Exhibition by Zheng Kaijia & Zhou Chi
CHOWspace, No.2, Lane 41, Yuqing Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai08/24/2024 – 09/30/2024
Based on a longstanding understanding of the instability of subjectivity, “Unanswered Call” explores how the body, as the materiality of subjectivity, suspends and interrogates external discourses, disciplines, and constitutions. The exhibition focuses on two artists' painting practices regarding bodies and human subjects – Zheng Kaijia pays attention to the multiple forms of identity existence through self-portraiture, contemplating the fickleness of perception and the deceptive notion of a complete subject; Zhou Chi presents how the body "escapes" from predetermined values, dogmas, and frameworks through flowing lines, emancipated through creation and release.
As informed by concepts including interpellation and the mirror stage, the exhibition is grounded in the dynamics between subjectivity and external mechanisms, along with how it transforms into an introspective reconfiguration of identities. Althusser's theory of interpellation emphasizes how society hails individuals to specific identities through ideological apparatus, thereby legitimating them as social subjects.1 Lacan's mirror stage points to the existence of an idealized self constructed through external mirroring and the gaze of the Other, whose inherent dislocation and incompleteness reflect the innate split of subjectivity in self-identification.2
The exhibition focuses on moments of unanswered call where the body finds itself in a paradoxical situation of asking to be interpellated as a subject by the very social values that exclude it. The "exile" state of apatride implies a temporary suspension of identity, as described by Paul B Preciado in his essay "My Body Doesn't Exist", where the body is perceived as a "non-existent existence" excluded from the mainstream, an insurgent institution without constitution.3 The instability of subjectivity turns against the language of those who name it in order to deny it, disclosing the destitution of existing frameworks. Employing this body image as an intervention, the exhibition explores how the highly fragile, ambiguous, and unstable subjectivity represented by "non-existent existence" exerts constraint and resistance to the highly rational orders.
1 Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
2 Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage”. In Social Theory: The Multicultural Readings, edited by C. Lemert, 343-44. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 1949.
3 Preciado, Paul B. “My Body Doesn’t Exist”. In The Documenta 14 Reader, 117-34. Prestel: 2017.
Producer: Yuhui Zhou
Artistic Consultant: Junyao Chen
Curator: Sylvia Tan
Curatorial Assistants: Qifei Jiang, Yunhan Jin, Zhaohan Lu
