( ) It is an inevitable, ceaseless, and intangible performance.
Zhu Kuang’s 2024 installation Circus establishes a critical speculative field of fiction and presence, anchored by a dramatically saturated red velvet curtain as its visual and conceptual core. This work extends the artist’s sustained deconstructive inquiry into everyday signifiers and embodied perceptual experience.
The curtain, suspended at a precarious angle, preserves the ritualistic gravitas of a theatrical proscenium while subverting the certainty of performance through its unstable orientation. Below it, four horseshoe sculptures function as minimalist synecdoches, activating the audience’s imaginative projection of the absent horse—the implied subject of the work. This dynamic of “absence within presence” constitutes the piece’s central tension: the invisible horse never materializes, yet through the anchoring of the horseshoes, it achieves a virtual, cognitive standing in the viewer’s mind.
Zhu appropriates the “circus” as a conceptual framework—a site of both spectacle and artifice—recasting it as a philosophical theater. The red velvet curtain, no longer a functional device for concealing or revealing performance, operates as a perceptual filter: it obstructs access to the “backstage” while its suspended state evokes a perpetually deferred performance. As emblems of power and domestication, the horseshoes’ cold, industrial metal contrasts sharply with the curtain’s sumptuous, tactile velvet, amplifying the work’s interrogation of the porous boundary between reality and representation.
Circus ultimately confronts the pervasive “performative” condition of contemporary life. Through a restrained visual lexicon, Zhu invites viewers to confront the possibility that the “reality” we inhabit is itself a collective circus, co-constructed by shared imagination and symbolic systems.
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