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.