Paris Internationale
Ang Ziqi Zhang, Erwan Sene
21 — 26 October 2025
Belief is a Drug | Nonlinear Time
For our first presentation at Paris Internationale, we bring together paintings from New York-based Ang Ziqi Zhang and sculptures from Paris-based Erwan Sene.
Like “a shoebox, a box with a laptop, or a flatscreen TV,” the small to mid-sized paintings of Ang Ziqi Zhang evoke modularity and the portable commodity. Their dimensions respond on point to Zhang’s lived conditions: how she might live, move, and operate. They are made to circulate. Some works are arranged as singles, diptychs, or triptychs. Further underlining their internal logic and relational structure, the multi-panel works may have been rotated or flipped in the making. An inherent connectivity surfaces: a visual tether between segments of the same whole. The grid becomes a score. While panels may invert or reassemble, often a line of continuity threads through like a seam in fabric. They are an organism greater than the sum of its parts.
Zhang’s palette is distinctly synthetic, informed by traffic signage, highway pavement, fluorescent safety gear, metallics—the vibrational affect of “high-visibility.” These colours speak at once to the idea of wading through the world day-to-day, and to rave culture’s charged artificiality. As a student, she would fill her homework pages with deranged parabolas—forms that in their decontextualization refused linear logic, spilling into the margins like unsanctioned performance. Later, while studying economics, she rendered graphs and curves with mechanical precision.
Erwan Sene’s installation unfolds as a dense sculptural field, made of intricate layers of sound, material, and movement. Found objects like streetlamp casings, metal grates, and PVC piping are embedded alongside cast resin, hand-cut wood, or fabricated hardware, with no visible distinction between salvaged and newly made elements. This collapse of hierarchy is central to his practice: an insistence that nothing—no part, no gesture—is more authored than another. His materials form a relational assemblage, drawing the viewer into a multi-sensory encounter. To enter the space is to be enfolded, metabolized into its circuitry. Such erasure of stratification extends into Sene’s sound practice. His compositions, like his sculptures, are thick with texture and equivalence: metallic clatter folds into drone, field recordings glitch on percussive bursts. No foreground or background. Only planes of intensity that press against one another.
The DJ set augments this sculptural logic: a transitory collage where meters and atmospheres layer, rupture, and entangle. Both Sene and Zhang contribute to their respective cities’ nightlife, a cultural context that informs not just the aesthetics of this fair’s dual presentation, but the politics. Rave culture—with its synthetic palates, bodily (re)arrangements, and dissolution of linear time—is uniquely positioned to challenge our pervasive on-the-clock, time-is-money regime—our almighty temporal economy. And it is within this sweaty, fleeting space of alterity, we can perhaps grasp at both new and ancient formations of being-together, feet pounding to the tick-tock of utopic connectivity.