"Beep Beep" by Ang Ziqi Zhang features a vivid palette of greens and purples, with sweeping lines creating a dynamic, flowing composition across three panels. The left two-thirds of the painting are dominated by abstract, landscape-like forms, while the right panel shifts to a darker, more textured area with swirling patterns. Zhang employs gestural improvisation and thin paint washes, creating a sense of movement and depth. This work reflects Zhang's exploration of symbols and signage, questioning societal structures through a playful yet critical lens influenced by rave culture and late capitalism's semiotics. ...
Ana Ziqi Zhang work across different modes of painting, design, DJ-ing, and event hosting to investigate intersections between affect, semiotics, and the conditions of late capitalism. In their paintings, visual play and gestural improvisation serve as metonym for navigating and making sense of the structures that prop up our worlds. They take seemingly neutral images and symbols such as signage, diagrams, and graphical representations as starting points for this painterly modulation and association. These modulations occur through varied modes of mark-making including gesture, obfuscation, and the slow accumulation of thin washes of paint. Researching, scrambling, and re-situating signs in their paintings is their way of questioning the images that determine our movements and feelings. Their practice extends beyond painting primarily through dance music and nightlife. Rave culture and history provide for them not only conceptual inspiration for their studio work, but sensorial engulfment and pleasure as well. Both painting and DJ-ing operate as spaces of sensorial play and alterity for them; the two are always informing each other. These crossovers in sensibility are informed equally by their time in the studio and their time spent on dance floors. The social aspects of their music practice have also moved them to explore an ethos of collaboration and celebration in making. Their collaborative printmaking and design work, often manifested as party flyers for both real and imagined events, conceptually complement their paintings and tether their visual and sound/time-based practices together. ...
Conditions began as Bonny Poon in 2017, Paris. Located on the 26th floor of a brutalist residential tower in the 13e, the gallery was co-founded by Nathaniel Monjaret (Marbriers 4, Geneva) and artist Bonny Poon.
Since 2023, the gallery is known as Conditions and is based out of Toronto’s Chinatown, while operating internationally. From the outset, Bonny Poon has striven to highlight the conditions that make art—from its production to sale—possible.
Beyond the art on display, we foreground the history of our artists' attitudes, positions, and networks. We have presented the Parisian and Canadian debut of many intergenerational artists and cultural figures, emerging and established.
As a gallery and an auto-fiction, we support transgressive artists and critical experiments. We mine the backstage, backroom working relations that unfold between our artists, clients, critics, and dealers—a parade of economic reality, a lasting dream of community. ...
