Zoey Yang: Out of Measure

Project BUJIN ART is pleased to present the solo exhibition Geometry, Geometry, featuring recent works by artist Zoey Yang (Yang Zuyi) across multiple media, including printmaking, sculpture, and performance.

Yang’s practice explores the process by which the body leaves traces on the surfaces of various materials—a process that is simultaneously one in which materials receive and retain external forces.

Within her work, this process unfolds through repetition and continuity, carrying a distinct sense of rhythm. Through repeated gestures of pressing, stretching, and striking, the body shapes the material; under sustained force, the material’s surface gradually becomes smoother and more even.

“Geometry,” in this context, points toward an imagined ideal form. It is associated with order, standardization, and measurement, while also implying a prescriptive and controlling tendency regarding what shape a material ought to assume.

If production governed by “geometry” suggests a linear temporality moving from disorder to order, Yang’s practice instead foregrounds a cyclical, non-linear experience of time.

Julia Kristeva once described “women’s time” as a mode of temporality characterized by repetition and eternity—a temporality that does not advance linearly, but is structured through cycles, returns, and deferrals.

This temporality is rooted in the rhythms of female physiology, while also extending to processes of social reproduction and the gestation of life.

In Yang’s work, this temporality is not directly represented through explicit bodily narratives. Rather, it is embedded in the treatment of materials: repeated acts of pressing and striking do not aim toward completion. What matters is the persistent tension between the material’s actual transformation and its anticipated ideal form.

As materials approach smoothness, they nonetheless retain traces that cannot be entirely erased. These traces arise both from external forces and from the material’s own resistance, leaving the work in a state that is at once shaped and not fully determined.

This deviation from “geometry” does not manifest as a declarative stance or oppositional gesture. Instead, it operates from within existing structures.

The system imposes constraints, yet also provides support. The body cannot fully detach itself from the conditions it inhabits; it can only continuously adjust, endure, and persist within them. This condition does not point toward rupture or transcendence, but toward a sustained presence—within established scales and norms, and beyond the stability and completeness promised by geometry—where subtle, repetitive deviations take place.

Zoey Yang is a London-based Chinese Canadian artist working primarily in sculpture, textiles, and painting/etching. She uses her body as both medium and tool, repeatedly imprinting it onto materials to produce gradual deformation, while conceiving of materials as bodies subjected to constraint.

Within a cyclical temporal framework approaching a threshold of fragility, her work explores the intersections between femininity, religious discipline, and socially constructed expectations.

Through a material investigation into the tension between bodily imperfection and architectural symmetry, symbols of resistance emerge from the intertwined historical contexts of religion and feminism, revealing a form of resilience that resonates within a post-secular condition.