Where Light Enters
The exhibition title takes its cue from a line in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, the crack here is not simply a mark of fracture or absence, but a point of opening. It is the place where established frameworks begin to shift, where seemingly fixed boundaries between histories, materials, and cultures become permeable. In this space of passage, new connections emerge and new meanings take shape.
Moving between Paris and Jingdezhen, Qi Zhuo occupies a position shaped by both critical distance and material proximity. Life in Paris offers a space from which familiar cultural forms can be seen anew, freed from the assumptions that often accompany them. Jingdezhen, meanwhile, grounds these reflections in the realities of material production, where history is embedded not in narratives alone, but in the traces left by clay, glaze, fire, labour, and use. Within this oscillation between distance and immersion, tradition takes shape through the continual reworking of material, context, and experience.
Bubble Game: Historical Fragments and Glass Interventions
The Bubble Game series serves as a key point of departure for this exhibition. Working with fragments of ancient sculptures, ceramic shards, and other objects bearing traces of history, Qi introduces blown glass into areas of absence and fracture. Rather than reconstructing an original whole, these translucent interventions introduce a new material logic, allowing the object to exist simultaneously as artifact, transformation, and possibility.
Glass here is more than a material, and more than a transparent, refined, or decorative effect. It embodies a particular temporality: having once flowed under intense heat, glass is arrested in a moment of cooling. Stable in appearance, it nevertheless retains the potential for further transformation. As light moves across its surface, producing shifting reflections and refractions, historical objects take on a renewed presence, one that remains open, mutable, and continually subject to change.
Occupying a space between fragility and strength, transparency and opacity, fluidity and solidity, glass becomes a medium through which different temporalities, cultures, and material conditions are brought into relation. It creates a new set of relationships, allowing the crack to become more than a wound—a point through which light enters.
Translation and Reconfiguration
In Qi Zhuo’s practice, what matters is not how to restore a complete past, but how objects continue to generate significance once they have been displaced from their original contexts and enter new networks of relationships.
Many historical objects survive not because they remain unchanged, but because they are continually subjected to acts of viewing, use, collection, interpretation, and recontextualization. Through these processes, they undergo ongoing shifts in identity and significance. From sacred images to collectible artifacts, from everyday utensils to cultural heritage, the value and status of objects are constantly being renegotiated.
Through this continual process of translation, familiar frameworks of understanding are set into motion, giving rise to new connections and unforeseen meanings. Cracks constitute a generative thread running through Qi Zhuo’s practice, sustaining its capacity for growth and possibilities. History emerges as a material presence that remains active and responsive, acquiring renewed vitality through processes of contact, transformation, and reactivation.
About the Artist
Born in Liaoning, China, in 1985, Qi Zhuo graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts du Mans in France in 2013. He subsequently completed the KAOLIN postgraduate program in Contemporary Ceramic Art at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Limoges and the DAS–REALisation postgraduate program at the Geneva University of Art and Design. He currently lives and works between Paris and Jingdezhen.
Recent solo exhibitions include Qi Zhuo: Yes & No (Aranya, Qinhuangdao, 2023), Bubble (Perrotin, Shanghai, 2023), History Never Really Says Goodbye (Paris-B, Paris, 2022), and Ghosts, Monsters, and Strange Tales (Paris-B, Paris, 2021). Recent group exhibitions include Les Énergies de la terre (Musée National Adrien Dubouché, Limoges, 2026), Glasstress 2026 (Fondazione Berengo, Venice, 2026), and Gaze Across Time (Powerlong Museum, Shanghai, 2025).
