Aranya Art Center is pleased to announce Chinese artist Payne Zhu’s latest solo exhibition, Sounding the Deep Water, presenting all-new sculpture, video, and installation works. Against the backdrop of the history and economic activities of Qinhuangdao Port, and drawing on a whale’s perspective, the artist recounts a history of expanding capital revolving around maritime trade. Sculptures in the form of four dishes highlight the aromatic and visual layers of the food experience, referencing the process by which spices and porcelain, once considered luxury goods, were transformed into everyday consumer products through the reconstruction of value, in an exploration of the expansionary momentum of capitalism from early times to the present.
The exhibition further explores the ways in which capital promotes market development and creates opportunity space through such means as financial derivatives and the financialization of the ecology. The video installation Promises from the Futures (2025 Derivative Edition) uses two channels to present real scenes of water network trade and two performers playing commodities and their derivatives in order to depict the emotional connections established by their drifting circulation and interplay. In the Atrium, Whale-Derived Pump focuses on how ecosystems are being turned into new fields for capital flows, and makes dystopian predictions about the anticipated outcome: by simulating the role of vertical whale migration in stimulating the ocean carbon cycle, the right to emit carbon is transformed into a tradable asset, an environmental endeavor evolving in the frenzy and fear into pure opportunistic behavior. The artwork resembles a ship either rising through the water’s surface or plunging into the depths of the ocean. This contradictory moment is a surfacing and retracing of the history of capitalism, and a hint at the price that may be ultimately exacted from embroiling nature in the financialization of ecology.
The exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and Associate Curator Wu Yiyang. The exhibition is on view from March 16, 2025 through September 7, 2025.
Payne Zhu
b. 1990, Shanghai; lives and works in Shanghai.
Payne Zhu probes into different economic systems and works in between the rheology of finance, competing bodies and the flooding of images. Aspiring to become an exile from within, Zhu manages to create an alterative economics. Often taking unconventional moving images as a point of departure, Zhu’s works celebrate the unmatchable nature of the subject through the mismatch of different technological media.
Payne Zhu’s solo exhibition MATCHPOOL was held at OCAT Shanghai in 2022. Recent group exhibitions include: How To Be Happy Together?, Para Site, Hong Kong (2024); The Show Must Go On, The Soil Collection, Beijing (2024); Cosmos Cinema, 14th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2023); Empathy, OPYUM 022 Video Performance Festival, Paris (2022); Meditations in an Emergency, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2020); Now is the Time, Wuzhen Contemporary Art, Wuzhen (2019); New Metallurgists, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2018); A Better Version of You, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2017); You Won’t Be Young Forever, No. 235 Guangfu Road, Shanghai (2016); and The Nightmare of the Exhibition Part II, Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2015), among others. His recent performances and lecture performances include: Rendering Zhenze: Diadromous in Spring, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2024); and The Financial Specter in The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, vortex@The Cloister Project, Shanghai (2022).
