1.

What do we observe when we change the scale? How is an element distorted when its dimensions are modified? This gesture is present in Huaqian Zhang’s work Overheating, where the artist takes microscopic images of bodily fluids and enlarges them to create the pieces for this installation. In this way, what were initially samples of sweat, blood, tears, discharge, and saliva undergo a process of digitization and rematerialization. Huaqian takes the digital microscopic images as patterns to later create the fabrics for her pieces.

2.

As Paul B. Preciado writes in Testo junkie (2013): « Deep down, something is flowing, circulating within a circumscribed space, but it can spread. On this stratum, feelings exist in their gelatinous state, just before the evaporation and transformations of carbon solutions into electric currents. Such is the state of blood, water, sperm, vaginal secretions, saliva, urine, rachidian and amniotic solutions, the infusion in which the brain floats; but also what one has just ingested, the gel, and exterior nourishment for the body during the process of gastric assimilation, before it’s transformed into fecal matter.» (1).

3.

Suddenly, the images of fluids that Huaqian has captured to create the works infect the Jacquard knitting machine intervened with Arduino that she works with. The threads are now veins and circuits through which saliva, blood, tears flow again, in motion, in a material form again. This is where the technical and industrial dimension of the knitting machine is interwoven with the warmth and craftsmanship of hand sewing, the overheating of the machine, and the heat generated by wearing the fabric. This expression of the body through the fluids it expels – from the sadness or emotion of tears, the pain of blood, the pleasure of discharge – Huaqian connects here with the warmth and tenderness of fabrics that seek to wrap up the body that enters the exhibition.

4.

In 1977, Ray and Charles Eames produced a 10-minute short film for IBM titled Powers of Ten. As described at the beginning of the film, it is “a film about the relative size of things in the universe / and the effect of adding another zero”.In it, a naive and almost ironic scene of a couple having a picnic becomes increasingly tiny as the field of vision opens up: a park, a city, a country, a planet, the solar system, constellations, the universe… Curiously, the final macro image seems to connect with the micro when the opposite exercise is carried out: the point of view enters the man’s skin until it penetrates the cells, proteins, atoms… The resulting images from the two extremes are extremely similar. Similarly, in Overheating, Huaqian connects the macro and micro planes, especially in the two triptychs, in which the saliva resembles the image of the planet Earth and the blood resembles that of galaxies.

5.

Throughout history, the development of machines and technical devices has faced the challenge of managing the heat generated during their operation. From steam engines and coal combustion to supercomputers, the history of overheating and thermal management in machines could be considered a parallel history of technological evolution. In Overheating, Huaqian reflects on this management of temperature in machines from their physical condition, but also in their affective dimension, through the embrace that envelops, the garment made by hand by a loved one or even during a picnic with a friend. Perhaps Overheating is an exhibition that, as in the film by Ray and Charles Eames, is about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.

Notes

(1) Paul B. Preciado, Testo junkie. Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era, Feminist Press, New York, 2013, pp. 253-254.

Exhibition by Huaqian Zhang presented at dilalica from June 7 to September 7, 2024.