Last year, as Zhang Ran and I wandered through Berlin’s Neukölln district, it was unfathomable to relate the pervasive smell of roasted chicken drifting through the streets to her work. Yet the way she described this neighborhood—where she has lived for many years—was always picturesque, like fragments from a novel.

“Eventsight” marks Zhang Ran’s first solo exhibition in China. Based between Berlin and Rotterdam, the artist continues the narrative trajectory initiated in her previous Berlin exhibition, Dark Romance – eponymous with her novel and its second chapter – which also serves as the prologue to this exhibition.

In Dark Romance, processes of growth and dissolution unfold like cellular division. The fictional characters are conceived as fragments of a visual G protein–coupled receptor—entities that come into being through acts of description. Rapidly proliferating, collapsing, and vanishing, these life-forms perceive themselves and one another through the mutual articulation of tentacles, vesicles, cavities, and membranes. Description and fiction propel their narratives across time; within minutes, emotion, longing, and love emerge out of chaos.

Zhang Ran’s early painting practice centered on the artist’s fascination with tactility. Even the most minute gap between brushstrokes seemed to summon another world. To access these details, she used a microscope as an extension of her vision, opening up a new perceptual field. In examining minute fragments of everyday life, chicken skin became a key medium of observation. Its viscous surface, embedded with fibers and residues of lived experience, is visualized under the magnifying glass as a site of investigation. Like a detective, the artist traces the origins and paths of these fragments, where transformation and decay render chicken skin into a new artistic medium.

The artist suffers from a visual condition of floaters, which superimposes spots over the objects of observation. As she engages with the molecular structures of muscle and ocular proteins, the images scientists use to map them appear as glimpses into the underlying code of life. Though virtual, they represent an invisible reality intrinsic to the body itself. Moving through these datasets, Zhang Ran cannot be detached from objective observation. Her own corporeal condition, the mediation of the microscope, the wounded bodies from war, and the failing organs of illness all shape her field of perception. Within the microscopic, invisible structures of protein molecules, she forms connections with bodies marked by suffering. The pain of “reaching the inaccessible” becomes a gesture of mourning—for both the conditions we inhabit and the bodies affected by disease. Knowledge, here, is processed through a deeply situated and affective framework. 

In the novel Babel, scholars devote their lives studying translation by pairing synonyms and phonetic equivalents of different tongues and engraving them onto silver bars. Yet it is precisely the untranslatable—the gaps and absences—that generate the bars’ power. Rather than striving for perfect equivalence, these scholars pursue the most elegant form of loss. Similarly, when Zhang Ran encounters scientific visualizations of protein structures, she confronts the tension between objective data and their existence as part of the living body. These images function simultaneously as precise correspondences and as sites of irreducible difference—where fiction and reality fail to fully translate into one another. This tension extends into her lived reality and finds release in her recent works.

Her laser-cut acrylic works, occupying a 2.5-dimensional space, materialize the G-visual protein narratives of Dark Romance. These works emerge from negative forms—the acrylic sheets are the remnants of cut-out patterns. Inkjet-transferred textures of chicken skin, molecular diagrams, and floater-like motifs interweave into dense surfaces. Acrylic offcuts, images, and even peeled protective films are recycled into subsequent works, continually generating new forms and characters. Carrying traces of their prior states, they evolve through iterative processes of replication and mutation. “You replicate me, I replicate you.” Within this fictional ecology, Xong is neither center nor sovereign, but a rhizomatic network composed of seven inter-referential entities and a mysterious violet substance. In this decentralized system, each node remains connected to the unseen and the uncertain, yet continues to call out—intimately—for love.

This is a fictional technology of healing.

Who would have imagined that chickens, descendants of dinosaurs, would today manifest not only in the ubiquitous scent of roasted chicken in Berlin’s Neukölln, but also in the popularity of fried chicken in Beijing’s Wangjing district?

Text by: Esther Sun