Driving in the Void

Vanguard Gallery will be temporarily closed from 31 March to 2 April 2026 for the preparation of an upcoming exhibition, and will reopen on 3 April.

The gallery will also be closed from 4 to 6 April for the Qingming Festival holiday, and will reopen on 7 April.

Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present “Driving in the Void”, a duo solo project by Li Jiaqing and Zai Pengfei, opening on 12 March. The exhibition brings together recent paintings and 3D-printed works by the two artists, juxtaposing traditional and emerging materials in the exhibition space. Divergent colors and textures are bound by an underlying operative logic. Within this system, form and material do not function as endpoints but remain in a continuous process of calibration and deviation, as if driving through the unknown.

Zai Pengfei’s “Motion Sickness Medicine” series originates from hallucinations he experienced during meditation and dreaming. Mazes forged by body and consciousness extend into the pictorial field, continuously generating and unfolding. Recurrent vaults, steps, arrows, and curving surfaces appear to promise orientation, yet ultimately refuse to resolve into clear guidance. Through repeated acts of drawing and recording, the artist transforms them into embodied experience, intervening in and reshaping the viewer’s perception of space and movement.

In Li Jiaqing’s 3D-printed works, each modular unit is meticulously ordered and precise, bearing the refined finish of exacting control. His practice does not engage narrative directly, instead, through acts of judgment, he constructs units—each functioning as a point of departure or inflection within distinct logical sequences—into carriers awaiting further interpretation. Thereby, he draws the viewer into a computational field in which order is continuously generated, accumulated, and translated.

Driving, understood as an ongoing negotiation of rules through logic, intuition, experience, and situational awareness, offers a lens through which the practices of Li Jiaqing and Zai Pengfei move us beyond the world as representation, into a void that exists before form takes shape. Here, inference loses its predetermined rules and coordinates; meaning arises only through the agency of consciousness. As drivers, how might we reconstruct systems of order? Should our orientation rely on embodied perception, or on judgments derived from external conditions?