Sharon Xinran Zhang
Enabler and Vanilla Conjuring (纵容者和寻常戏法)
with works by Aidan Duffy, Ella Rose Flood, Craig Jun Li, James Krone, John Sandroni, Evian Wenyi Zhang
February 20, 2026–April 4, 2026
Reception: Friday February 20, 6–8pm
In Enabler and Vanilla Conjuring (纵容者和寻常戏法), Sharon Xinran Zhang invites six artists to participate in her solo exhibition. Their six works, together with nine of her own, form a dialogue, a play of literary devices, or a house party.
How could I possibly express everything You mean to me? I love You so much that it hurts. I love You so much that representation fails. Trying to explain the relationship between me and You is like constructing a sentence out of pictures, or a painting out of perfumes. There is always Too Much To Say.
This is a show of nine + six = fifteen works. I am not one person but multiple; or, rather, I am less-than-one, iterated fifteen times.
First, nine attempts to diagram the failure of reading. For when one is as devoted as I am to You, the world becomes undifferentiated. Deciphering signs according to one language or another is impossible—everything points back to You: the ice in my drink is Your beautiful glass skin, the cross on the wall is the twinkle in Your eye. I catch glimpses of You in strange refractions of color, in textures mutated out of fur, skin, blood, metal, foam, beams of viscous light. You are a code or game or trick that consumes the world and spits it out as pure surface, a scrawl of secret handwriting just for me.
Then there are the six of You. Looking at You makes me want to vomit; no, You ARE my vomit. You are everything I want deep inside me but my body rejects, no matter how much of it I force down my throat. The only way to experience total pleasure is to watch someone else receive it.
I love You, because You are the vessel by which everything that might pass through me is obliterated and then reassembled in its distinct and perfect form. I don’t want to know You. The closer You are, the less I see. I am forever outside, adjacent to, subsidiary, assisting; it is only by virtue of the frame that the painting can be watched, only through the conniving [纵容] voice off screen that the movie can be read.
There is nothing singular about my love; it is beautiful because it is generic, common [寻常]. Everything true is a cliché.
This is a letter from me to You: “diabolical in all its innocence,” like Kafka said.
This is not Sharon speaking. This is not not Sharon speaking. Welcome to our party <3
—Lucia Kan-Sperling, February 2026.
Sharon Xinran Zhang works and lives in New York. Her work concerns the attention through way of translation: between mediums and politics, languages and senses, textures and screens. Visual vomits that imitate forms of desire, while resisting proper enunciation.
Based in London, Aidan Duffy works with discarded and second-hand materials to explore our shifting relationships to objects and the psychodramas we project onto them. Encountering things at the tail end of desire, he questions what remains once their original narratives collapse, structuring collisions between exhausted materials to generate new meaning. His studio practice treats making as research - an evolving negotiation with form, colour, rhythm, and texture - where sculpture emerges through problem solving rather than image making. By refusing easy narratives, Aidan creates works that inhabit in between zones, inviting emotional and physical engagement while reflecting the instability of value and meaning in contemporary life.
Ella Rose Flood (born 1999, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Chicago. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Zian Gallery (forthcoming), Hangzhou, China; Container and Last Display, Bodenrader, Chicago, IL; Reposoir (with Dominick Di Meo), Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY; These are just the words you know the feeling, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, France; The Allotter, in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; Only Silver, Lubov, New York, NY; Memorial Universe!, Jargon Projects, Chicago, IL; and Forever (with Graham Wiebe), Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare, Italy. Selected three-person and group exhibitions include Modèle Vivant, Los Angeles, CA; Spectral Fine Arts Trust (with Boz Deseo Garden and Graham Wiebe), Final Hot Desert, London, UK; Dog Breath, Stop-Gap Projects, Columbia, Missouri; Bodenrader, Chicago, IL; Wanderlust, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA; and Quiet, Cold, Jargon Projects, Chicago, IL.
“CJ” Craig Jun Li ( born 1998, China) lives and works in New York City. Li’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including Chapter NY, New York; Emmelines, New York; Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; lower_cavity, Holyoke; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kurtkubin, CDMX; SYSTEMA, Marseille; François Ghebaly, LA & New York; Taon, Ivey-sur-Seine; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh; Chris Andrews, Montréal; RAINRAIN, New York; September Sessions, Stockholm; hatred 2, New York; Prairie, Chicago; and Canal Projects, New York, among others. Li operates a nomadic curatorial project, “Benny’s Video,” currently hosted in a studio sublet in Bushwick.
Over the last twenty years, James Krone's (born 1975, Chicago; lives in Berlin) work has been preoccupied with the problem of whether one subject can ever be made available to another, regarding representation. A central concern is whether such a possibility would necessitate the dissolution between one's experience of their interiority and their environment, and if this split would register as empathy or psychosis. Recent exhibitions include Realität at Scherben, Berlin; The Fortran Muscle at Stooj Fine Arts, Berlin; Emergency of Pattern at REPERTOIRE, Berlin; Wet Resistance at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund; A Promise of Happiness at M LeBlanc, Chicago; When There is no Laughing Matter, Laughter Matters at the Halle für Kunst Lüneberg, Lüneberg. Krone is also the founder and director of Louche Ops, an exhibition space that's been operating in Berlin since 2022.
John Sandroni (born 1994, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. His works have been exhibited at Paul Soto Gallery, New York (solo); Art Basel Hong Kong with Christian Andersen; Christian Andersen, Copenhagen (solo); Champ Lacombe, Biarritz; Arcadia Missa, London; Derosia Gallery, Fierman Gallery, David Zwirner Gallery, Theta Gallery, and Kai Matsumiya, all in New York; And Now Gallery, Dallas; and DREI Gallery, Cologne, amongst other venues.
Evian Wenyi Zhang (born 2000, Shanghai, China) lives and works in Berlin. She holds a BA in Art History from New York University. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2025), Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2024) and Lulu, Mexico City (2022). Her works were part of the group exhibitions at Société, Berlin (2025); OG Gallery, Istanbul (2025); Sister Galerie, Seoul (2024); Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2024); Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin (2024); Public Gallery, London (2024, 2023); Travesía Cuatro, Madrid (2023); Tara Downs, New York (2023); 69 Art Campus, Beijing (2024); and MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2021). Zhang’s work is in the collections of M Woods Collection, Beijing; and X Museum, Beijing.