Stella Zhong

Adriana Blidaru: When I first encountered your work, it was through Comet Without a Tail, your 2021 exhibition. I still remember walking into the installation and feeling completely struck by it. Looking back now, how does that installation feel to you? What has evolved in your work since then, and what still feels essential about that exhibition?

Stella Zhong: I had been making work for a long time, but that was my first real public-facing show. When I look back now, it was really sort of an experiment for me to test how much I can not show. You had to take off your shoes and walk into it barefoot. Most of the works were hidden within a constructed floor. You couldn’t see much of anything, really. There wasn’t a press release; I made a point not to have one written. I was interested in finding the line between how much was too little to show and how much was too much to ask. And crossing it. Where the line is is less and less critical to me now. I’m learning that I can find ways to define it however I want and always cross it.

AB: When you’re constructing a work or an installation like this, how much are you thinking about the experience of the viewer from the very beginning—how they move their body through the space, whether they have to crouch or squint? How much are you considering the viewer and their physical body in the installation while you’re making the work?

SZ: I don’t think about the viewer. While working, I always simulate the experience of my work, but from my standpoint and the perspective of the architecture—does the wall feel squeezed? The air—does it condense or spread around this mass? From the perspective of its sibling work made previously, or a random ball if it were bouncing next to it…

Consideration for other human viewers comes close to the installation stage, when I sometimes have to compromise certain things, like legal passage widths.

For Comet Without a Tail, the show was made with attention to how the viewer would access it because I made discreet sculptures and had picked precise views from which they were visible. So the angle from which the viewer would perceive the work was on my mind throughout. I have since moved away a bit from being controlling in this particular way. Rather than considering the viewer, I often use my own body. I build everything from my own eye level. The spaces you mentioned, where you have to crouch down, squint, or jump, were built either as big as they need to be so I can’t squeeze through or as high as they need to be so that I can’t see over them. They are playgrounds for me.

I’ve always been playing this way. I have played house all my life, and I still kind of do that, both at home and in my practice. When shown in public, it’s a case of someone accessing someone else’s playground. That has been quite central to my work conceptually and experientially. My viewers find themselves coming into a space that has not been constructed for them. You are entering a world that’s not yours.

‍AB: There’s definitely a level of perceptual instability where you feel like maybe you’re too big, or too small, or too short, or too tall. I wonder what draws you to creating this uncertainty. I like to think about this a bit in terms of the un-centering of the viewer as the main observer, but I’m curious how you think about that.

SZ: I believe in instability—in meaning, in existence, in how we locate ourselves. My worlds are built to foreground instability as the condition, where there are no fixed positions and only relations.

At the core, it’s about letting go of the self, perhaps. I can’t help but always imagine being (something) other than “myself.” I look at objects and things around me and wonder what it feels like, for example, for a pencil to lie on a metal surface. The universe can be experienced in an infinite number of ways!

Even something as simple as wearing new or unusually tall shoes can completely change how the world looks. In sometimes extreme, other times nuanced or cerebral ways, I’m trying to make it inevitable to imagine being tiny, huge, scaleless, a ball rolling around, a little noodle just existing there—all at once. I think about empathy beyond bodies of our own, and I wonder if that can be felt. This leap of imagination is often on my mind when I build spaces.

AB: When you’re building these spatial compositions, how much do you think about technical elements like light, shadow, and atmosphere from the beginning? Do they shape the work early on, or do they emerge later in the installation process?

SZ: It’s always a journey to get there, but I will almost have a 360-degree cinematic view of what I’m building. That’s usually all in my head, rendered out sort of like a scene. I can “see” where things are in relation to each other, both at eye level and from a bird’s-eye view.

I like how you brought up the question of light. There is always a very particular direction of light that intersects with the work. I guess it would be a certain time of day or a particular atmosphere—and I’m more often thinking about somewhere above the atmosphere or somewhere subatomic, where light travels differently—but it’s also both very specific and vague because, again, it’s all fictional, and I can’t really describe it in words to anybody until the work is made.

So, to your question about the technicalities, through all these years of working, I’m still trying to develop ways to trick people into helping me construct the scenes that only exist in my head. I think about every corner and every bit of the world before it’s realized. But it’s perhaps pixelated, and when it’s actually conjured, it comes into higher resolution.

AB: I had a lot of questions about the mediums you use and how the works are made, but I feel they tie in quite organically here. You began with painting before moving into sculpture and installation, while continuing to use painting in your practice, as well as video. Hearing you talk about it this way, I understand these different approaches as ways of translating the 360-degree image you have in your head. Is that how you think about moving between mediums?

SZ: I have been thinking about the rendering question. I am often asked if photos of my shows are computer renderings. There’s a certain level of sharpness or smoothness that can be mistaken for high resolution.

In the studio, everything bleeds into everything else. I build sets that I film in the same way as I make sculptures, except that the film sets are often very, very small and delicate (compared to the sculptures, which are usually more robust). In a sense, the videos are hyper-zoomed in to the atomic level of the worlds that the sculptures prompt—somewhere you can’t see with bare eyes, something that I feel is moving.

The paintings are more atmospheric. I often use them to figure out the conditions of light, as we just discussed, as well as gravity, proximity, and so on.

AB: How do you decide what kind of material to use for each object? Is that decision more instinctual, or is it something you know from the very beginning of the process?

SZ: I work with a pretty limited list of materials, and decisions within this list are instinctual. Almost all of my larger structures and sculptures start with wood, and the tiny, minuscule objects start with clay.

I like trying to make things work within limitations. So I am always fighting against the material, against the nature of the material, and then against nature—gravity—in general. I’m often making things that could have been made ten times more easily with the right material, but I stick with what I use and try to morph it into something else. There is an awkwardness and ambiguity that this process yields that’s critical to what I’m trying to do.

AB: I wonder what kinds of stories these objects reveal to you as you make them. Your process feels highly conceptual, but there also seems to be a narrative unfolding within it.

SZ: There are two simultaneous trajectories that my objects take me along.

One is very clear: I can see from the clay bits that I’m shaping that, for instance, “rice balls” are rolling into each other, and then there comes an “egg,” and they are about to fall into a deep hole—a standard storyline of a Stella work. It’s often about food and something happening to it, around it, or from it, within a larger world whose totality is inconceivable. This line of story exists in the studio and is embedded in the work.

When I come back to the work, in retrospect, what I see are accounts of becoming and degrading, emerging into existence and ceasing to exist—abstract strings of events with no clear order.

There are a lot of emotions that can emerge from these objects-in-events. Something that felt adorable and soft when I made it can turn scary or alien. I guess where these two trajectories meet is somewhere existential: every becoming and being is at once wonderful and terrifying.

AB: What I’m hearing is a destabilization of meaning and identity: the viewer is always on slightly shaky ground, and the meanings projected onto things can shift or multiply. What do you hope this encounter opens up in the viewer? Beyond destabilizing meaning and inviting empathy, is there anything else you hope they might take away from the work?

SZ: I would say that my work is made mostly for me and, as I said earlier, I consider the viewer very little. So I don’t really know what they can get out of it.

Perhaps I’m trying to take something from them. I want them to leave feeling like they have left something behind or missed something. I see many of my sculptures, and the larger installations too, functioning as decoys. They are the first things visible, and they obstruct access to other works and the space itself. In a way, the work is a vetting system to see how curious one is. My work has many gates, and people pause at different stages. Sometimes I consider the success of a work in terms of how successfully I have gated it and how much the viewer has missed by the time they leave.

AB: It’s great.

SZ: It’s awful.

AB: I like the way you protect the work from the viewer’s sense of entitlement.

SZ: I am a bit obsessive about the protective part. It’s not simply hiding, but perhaps a sort of stealth: how to go under the radar, how to pass through safely without being observed directly.

I also think I have strong views about how we perceive reality, our access to truth, to history, and to the world in general. As people, as humans, we wake up and feel like we know things and that we should know everything. Part of my work is to make it physical, to make clear—first and foremost, to remind myself—that there are sides to truths and realities that we simply will not be able to access. And that’s okay. Things that are inaccessible and exceed our view are also true, and they can exist in their own states.