Zhao Chenxi: Pop-down

As the first presentation resulting from CHERUBY’s 2026 summer programme A Pop-up of A Pop-up, Pop-down takes the farewell celebration of the brand fabric qorn as its departure point, presenting the creative shift of its founder, Zhao Chenxi, over the course of his month-long residency. In contrast to the spirit of pop-ups, Pop-down focuses on the act of closing down, treating endings as opportunities for transition in artistic practice.

Although fabric qorn has ceased operations, the continued enthusiasm surrounding the brand’s past output suggests that what has come to an end is merely its function as a business, rather than the social life of the brand. In response to this passion, Zhao Chenxi reactivates the brand’s archive of prints and unrealized concepts, opening up qorn Workshop (2026) as a participatory collective space. Through this repurposing of the brand’s legacy, he continually negotiates the unstable boundaries between fashion and art, commodity and artwork, gradually reframing the practice as an exploration of how value is produced, ascribed, and circulated.

Building on fabric qorn’s engagement with grassroots visual culture in China and visual languages often dismissed today as cheesy and unfashionable, qorn Workshop turns to screen printing—a technique shared by both artistic production and industrial manufacturing—whose reproducibility and capacity for mass production allow it to blur the boundary between artwork and commodity. Here, value is no longer solely tied to circulation but is instead regenerated through collective creation. Restricting the palette to just eight monochromatic inks, the workshop echoes the repetitive iconography of pop art; this same color scheme extends to the DVD standby screen of the video work Brainsaver (2026), weaving a cohesive visual thread throughout the exhibition.

Stemming from Zhao Chenxi’s true practices, Brainsaver (2026) utilizes three vintage televisions to capture the trajectory of thoughts as they arise, linger, and dissipate. The work shifts the question of value away from commodities and toward the inner, subjective realm, focusing on how thoughts—inherently beyond exchange and measurement—acquire meaning. No Cutlery Required (2026) extends this very inquiry, anchoring it within the fabric of daily life. Surrounded by a growing mountain of disposable cutlery, Zhao Chenxi observed how these objects quietly enter our daily routines, recurring like fleeting thoughts yet often going unnoticed. Through a museological display, the work dismantles the binaries between the useful and the useless, the exhibited and the discarded, ultimately questioning how the “valuelessness” of everyday objects is constructed.

Together, these three works trace a trajectory that moves from the external world into the inner spiritual realm, before returning once more to the everyday. As the brand, fleeting thoughts, and ordinary objects successively become subjects of contemplation, Pop-down shifts its focus away from value itself toward a deeper question: how meaning can be reassigned once established functions and identities begin to dissolve.