Out of Measure presents works by Zoey Yang from recent years, bringing together etching, sculpture, and performance, among other media.

    Yang’s practice explores the process of mark-making on the surface of various materials, tracing how they receive and retain external forces. In her work, the repetitive gestures echo a certain rhythm. Through repeated actions of pressing, stretching, and striking, the body exerts force to shape the material; the surface tends towards flatness and smoothness under sustained pressure.

    In this context, ‘Measure’ encapsulates an imagined ideal form, one that is associated with order and standardisation, while implying an impulse to abide by formal regulations that determine the outlines of materials. If the process of perfecting something indicates a linear conception of time – moving from disorder to order – then what underlies Yang’s work is a cyclical and non-linear temporal awareness. Julia Kristeva termed ‘Women’s Time’ as being of a repetitive and enduring temporality; it does not orient itself towards linear progression or development, but is instead structured around cyclicity, recurrence, and deferral. It is grounded in female biological rhythms, while also extending into processes of social reproduction and the gestation of life.In Yang’s work, this temporality is not directly represented through an explicit bodily narrative, but instead permeates the treatment of material. The focal point of the pressing and striking motion is not a state of completion; rather, their significance lies in the ongoing tension between anticipated ideal changes and actual formal transformation. Whilst the material yields to pressure and flattens, it retains traces that cannot be fully erased. These marks result both from external forces and from the material’s own defiant nature, suspending the work in a state that is both constituted and yet indeterminate.

    This deviation from Measure does not take the stance of a definitive opposition, but rather operates as a mode of navigating within an existing structure. The system imposes itself as a constraint while also providing support; the body cannot fully detach from the conditions that shape it, and can only persist through continuous calibration. This state recoils from rupture and transcendence, but insists on presence – within established scales and norms, and outside of the geometric promise of regularity and completeness – where small, repeated deviations unfold.

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Exhibition text by Carrie Chen (curator) and Weitian Liu (academic contributor)