Oil on canvas ——— I stay on the couch longer than I mean to. How we ended up here was silly in a way that you would enjoy. 2010s pop music sends a low, steady pulse into the walls; the lights scatter across the sticky floor like the afterimage of a dream. For a moment I imagine your reflection there—not you exactly, but the shape of you, the way you might have looked if you were here. It reminds me of the old story, the boy who leaned too close to his own reflection and never pulled away. I understand him better now. It's not vanity that keeps you there, staring; it's the hope that if you wait long enough, what you see might change, that it might show you something else. But it doesn't. It only holds what’s already gone. ——— Still Water is part of an ongoing series that settles on nightlife as a way to re-address feelings of uncertainty that have informed Zhang’s identity since her early teen years. Drawing from her experiences as a 1.5-generation immigrant, the paintings capture universally recognizable experiences of human exploration, relying on the night as a space of fluctuation between known and unknown, seen and unseen, everywhere and nowhere.

Ketty Haolin Zhang

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Ketty Haolin Zhang 🇨🇳🇨🇦 is an emerging interdisciplinary artist. Informed by her diasporic experience as a 1.5-generation immigrant, her art practice navigates her relationship with placelessness, liminal space and (non)belonging in a hyper-globalized world. She is interested in creating works that embody both closeness and distance - the simultaneous desire to belong and to resist being defined.