Zeng Hong-Vaporous Existence

When Zeng Hong came to TAM to visit the exhibition space for “Rehearsal”, he encountered a problem — he didn’t know where to go for a meal. It wasn’t that there was nowhere to eat in the heart of the CBD; rather, he felt lost in the labyrinthine structure of the mixed-use complexes, unable to find his place in the environment. Even though this location was only 28 kilometers from his studio, it felt like stumbling into an oversized departure hall without a boarding pass. For the aimless “flâneur,” this place offered everything and nothing at the same time.

“The metropolis is not merely the module of capitalism and the extreme of urban-rural conflict; it also represents the massive emergence of the living and the non-living. It is a current, flowing through a network of high-speed cables, artificial satellites, and surveillance cameras, propelling the world toward an accelerated demise. It strips away each person’s heavy physical body and in return bestows upon her a foamy, vaporous body — light and indestructible.

To interrupt the metropolis’s perpetually urgent rhythm and sink into darkness, one must first make oneself invisible. Being nothing is not a humiliation or a tragedy of non-recognition. Quite the opposite: the later the moment we are seen, the more powerful we become. Once we are seen, we enter the countdown phase.”— Quoted from The Invisible Committee, L’Insurrection qui vient (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007).

This passage is presented in the exhibition space in the form of a cipher. Intermittent phone vibrations and a constantly flickering fluorescent light serve as the primary formal language of Zeng Hong’s new work, Prologue. By “modifying” these everyday objects — through agency both literal and socially functional — he interrupts people’s increasingly homogenized condition, telling us: the present is the prologue to the future. “The future” sounds so trivial today, yet Zeng Hong’s works persistently strike at the “specter-like” existence within people’s hearts.

In another work, Passion, Zeng Hong constructs the following scene: a mobile phone is left behind in a public place. The owner is gone, but the phone continues to receive text messages. The accumulation of telecommunication signals is not aimless; each message is an outpouring directed at the phone’s owner. Whether depressive or empathetic, they all testify — the phone’s owner will continue to exist in this manner. This is not determined by anyone’s authority; people no longer simply disappear.

Zeng Hong’s artistic language is never straightforward. Whether in his paintings or installations, one can clearly see what concerns him and also feel his tension, hesitating between estranged art and real action. He buries his sharpness in the darkness, making himself invisible, thereby gathering strength to puncture illusions. He is like someone repeatedly walking back and forth at a CBD intersection: moving but not a pedestrian, unusual yet unnoticed. By the time people recognize him as a “fellow traveler,” they also realize he is a “stranger on the path.

“The exhibition title “Vaporous Existence” inevitably calls to mind the iridescent sheen faintly appearing on soap bubbles — the surface of a convex lens tinged with the smell of kerosene, reflecting the vast world alongside a childlike, wondrously surprised face. At the same time, it always brings to mind a soft “pop.”In 2026, the eighth edition of Taikang Art Museum’s “Rehearsal” will commission artist Zeng Hong to present his solo exhibition, Vaporous Existence.