Leah Ke Yi Zheng

A catalog to accompany an expansive exhibition at the Renaissance Society of Leah Ke Yi Zheng's work,Change, I Ching,a series of 64 new paintings on silk, all based on the hexagrams of the I Ching (Book of Changes), a foundational text in Chinese philosophy.Leah Ke Yi Zheng envisioned her exhibition as a single complete work—although one composed of highly individualized paintings that unfolded with a logic of continual variation. Bringing together traditional Chinese materialities and conceptual art methodologies, the exhibition became a meditation on change itself: how it is read, made visible, and experienced through painting. This publication offers a sweeping visual introduction to Ke Yi Zheng’s project, featuring detailed reproductions of the individual paintings, as well as wider installation views that capture how the series of works occupied, and responded to, the architecture of the museum. The book also features three new texts that offer various perspectives on Ke Yi Zheng’s work and the exhibition. In a transcribed conversation between the artist and critic Isabelle Graw, the co-founder of Texte zur Kunste, the two delve into Ke Yi Zheng’s ways of thinking, her varying rejection and embrace of the traditions of American modernism and Chinese silk-painting, and questions of autonomy, recursiveness, and chance. In his essay, Martin Herbert considers the project’s relationship to the I Ching, taking the ancient book not as a master key so much as an invitation to see all of Ke Yi Zheng’s paintings in their differences. Taking a detour through the artist’s past work, which looked to antique machinery and binary code, Herbert ultimately connects her larger project to the technocratic present. Lastly, Myriam Ben Salah and Karsten Lund, co-curators of the exhibition, offer a close examination of how the artworks were experienced in the Renaissance Society’s unique context. After tracking the artist's manipulations of the architecture and attention to the changing light, they come to see the project as a closed system that operates and thrives by admitting contingency.