Lanxiong ZHENG: Archived in Bodies

Text by Calvin Wang

Cub_ism_ Artspace presents the third solo project by artist Lanxiong ZHENG, curated by Calvin WANG, on view from August 29 to October 17, 2026. The exhibition brings together a recent series of paintings by the artist, continuing his long-standing exploration of the body, perception, and individual experience, while further advancing the discourse into the relationship between time, life, and existence.

Lanxiong ZHENG’s practice has always been grounded in sustained observation of personal experience. From his early depictions of memory, childhood, and intimate spaces to his more recent turn toward the body and perception, he consistently extracts subtle, fleeting fragments from the continuum of daily life and grants them an independent, enduring presence through painting. For the artist, painting is not a representation of reality, but a process of transforming experience into visual and material form.

The new works further focus on bodily fragments and partial views. Hands, skin, limbs, and the tenuous relationship between the body and plants or the environment emerge as central motifs. Rather than constructing a complete or definitive bodily image, the artist employs fragmentation, cropping, and occlusion to render the body as an open visual structure. In these works, the body is both an object of contemplation and a medium through which time is sensed, experience is borne, and ongoing relations with the external world are enacted.

This shift also extends ZHENG’s enduring concern with the temporality of painting. Working in tempera on panel, he builds up layers and texture through the repeated application of color. Each act of covering and adjusting leaves a temporal trace within the creative process, so that the painting not only renders the body but also inscribes bodily experience and the accumulation of time within its material structure. The new works, therefore, are not records of a specific moment, but rather approximate a state of continuous becoming.

In ZHENG’s works, the body is never a fixed object. It is in constant flux through the sustained interplay of time, lived experience, and its relations with nature, environment, and others, leaving traces in the process. These traces do not point to explicit narratives; rather, they stand as evidence of time and lived experience edimented upon the body. What interests the artist is precisely the condition between occurrence, disappearance, and retention—and how the body gradually forms its cognition of the “self” in the midst of perpetual transformation.

The exhibition thus marks a further advancement in Lanxiong ZHENG’s practice: departing from private memory and perceptual experience, he positions the body as a medium connecting the individual with the world and the past with the present, and through painting re-examines how time acts upon life, and how life imprints its own form upon time.