Between Possession and Absence: Minyu Zhu’s Interweave Series and the Evocation of Visual Discontinuity and Affective Tension – Our Culture

In the contemporary art context, the meaning of an artwork is no longer confined to the moment of its completion by the artist. It is instead a perceptual mechanism that is activated, circulated, and continuously generated through the act of being seen. As Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, the cultural dimension of art is expanded through circulation, display, and re-coding (The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 1985). Minyu Zhu’s Interweave series embodies precisely this generative logic of viewing: her installations do not provide a fixed vantage point, but rather, through fissures of form and tensions of space, produce an experience of rupture. The viewer, confronted with structures that appear figurative yet resist functionality, enters into a cyclical state—seeing, losing, and attempting once more to possess—yet this process can never reach completion. It is within this endless act of unfinished viewing that Zhu constructs her distinctive field of visual tension.

Through embroidery, stitching, dislocated installation, and the juxtaposition of fibers, metals, and furniture-like forms, she reorganizes the rhythm of perception within space. This spatial strategy not only interrupts visual continuity but also challenges the passivity of the spectator in the realm of visual culture. Her works compel viewers to oscillate between “image–object–structure,” undermining the modernist presumption of self-evidence in the artwork. As John Berger argued in Ways of Seeing, the act of looking is never neutral but always shaped by culture, gender, and social structures. Zhu’s works exploit non-functional structures to disrupt utilitarian modes of vision, pulling viewers into unstable, indeterminate perceptual states. In line with Laura Mulvey’s notion of the politics of the gaze, where looking is itself an enactment of structural power, Zhu effectively inverts the mechanism: her works are no longer passive objects of vision but active “agents” that set the conditions of perception, leaving viewers as involuntary participants in spaces of rupture and affective disturbance. 

Yet Zhu’s installations are not merely spatial theaters but also performative languages of materiality. From tactility and craftsmanship to spatial configuration, each visual element resists simplified seeing and creates multi-layered sensory channels. In her textile-based works, touch is no longer supplemental but becomes a core dimension of cognition. Coarse and fine interwoven threads, exposed seams, and the antagonistic pairing of fabric and metal evoke what might be called a phantom tactile experience—where the body feels “touched” despite the absence of physical contact. This summons of tactility extends beyond the physical, entering into the domain of embodied perception, transforming vision into a tactile extension. The mechanism of translation between vision and touch ensnares viewers cognitively within the work.

This practice resonates with her understanding of “the labor of the hand.” She emphasizes that “the hand is an extension of language… handcraft is not nostalgia, but a political invocation of perceptual relations.” With meticulous manual techniques, Zhu responds to the mechanical information overload of the digital era. In Interweave, she does not attempt to restore clarity of communication; instead, she excavates the failures, delays, and noise of informational processes. The ruptured embroidery, irregular seams, and tensions between fiber and metal reveal how bodily memory intervenes in technological orders. These gestures are not mere homages to traditional craft but aesthetic strategies that resist the semantics of industrial uniformity—acts of bodily intervention inscribed within material. Her stitches and assemblages are not decorative gestures but material responses to the fractures of contemporary communication: thread becomes fragments of language, fibers bear misreadings, and matter itself produces interference. Material is both signal and noise; both revelation and concealment. This “disfluent visual language” becomes a deliberate resistance to the transparency of images.

Her deployment of materials also establishes a logic of form at its threshold state: metal as skeletal framework, fabric and fiber as muscular tissue, entangled in tension, torsion, and suspension. These structures are performative not in the sense of representation, but as ongoing enactments of morphological failure. Space is no longer a neutral backdrop but an active participant, where the weight of fiber and metal induces collapse, fracture, and instability. As one enters, one steps into a sensory crisis. Through what may be called a “corporealized material language,” Zhu transforms her works into agents that interact with the viewer’s body—not static objects to be gazed upon, but responsive fields that shape the act of seeing itself.

Her works resist any possibility of being “seen once and for all.” They are traps that demand repeated re-engagement through cycles of failure. In this process, viewing itself becomes a practice of “visual collecting”—not of objects, but of fragmented perceptual experiences. Each spectator loses some recognizable element within the work but gains an elusive resonance of sensation. For Zhu, “collecting” is a psychological rather than material act. Her installations resemble incomplete maps, where each encounter only traces a temporary path, never revealing the whole. The works perpetually evade classification, compelling viewers to gather fragments of perception within uncertainty and illusion. Such collecting is not about possession, but about an ethics of seeing grounded in loss. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “emancipated spectator,” Zhu detaches viewers from passive reception, reconfiguring them as collaborators in the production of meaning. In her nonlinear system of viewing, spectators must navigate on their own, and each disorientation becomes a site where vision regenerates itself.

In her aesthetic framework, time is not a neutral background of linear flow but is strategically embedded as a rhythm of perception. Through material indeterminacy, she produces ruptures of temporality, delaying the spectator’s ability to complete the act of seeing. One cannot instantly arrive at comprehension, but must linger precariously at the cliff edge of judgment. Her strategy of de-functionalization extends beyond the physical to the perceptual: chairs cannot be sat upon, frames cannot support, structures appear usable but remain inoperative. This persistent failure of “potential function” provokes reflections on use, order, and logic, and these reflections themselves become part of the act of seeing. Zhu’s installations are not made to be “understood” but to be “endlessly failed at in viewing.” Such aestheticized failure is both strategy and critique—an ironic counter to consumption, efficiency, and mastery. She engineers delay through material, suspension through structure, forcing the spectator into states of pause, oscillation, and unresolved tension between the familiar and the strange.

Her work is not about the display of objects but about the sustained interrogation of seeing. What she creates are visual events that cannot be completed in a single encounter nor easily categorized, becoming fissures and reverberations within the perceptual system of the viewer. Here, viewing is not an act of completion but an unfinished and recursive process. She reveals how seeing becomes a form of psychic weaving—not about possessing the artwork, but about undergoing it; not about reading the work, but about being read within it. By constructing logics of perpetual incompletion, Zhu transforms art into an apparatus of continual perceptual generation. In this sense, the spectator is no longer a detached observer but an indispensable co-conspirator within the structure of the work. They cannot withdraw, nor can they possess; they can only, through recurring loss, become weavers of perceptual resonance and memory. And thus, art itself eludes the closure of objecthood, remaining instead as an unfinished, ongoing labor of seeing.