In the exhibition "Lateness" (Chinese title: “Shanshan”), Zhang Miao presents a compelling sense of fluidity in his art practice. Shanshan is drawn from the Chinese idiom, shan shan lai chi, which describes slow and unhurried gesture of movement (a long time coming). With this, the artist suggests his art practice marks a trajectory of escape from a definitive perspective. This escape is not a resolute rupture but builds on existing foundations in a drawn-out manner. At times, these two types of perspectives could be interchangeable in a nested manner.

In Entering the Basement and Meeting the Sea, the light blue seems to extend to the dark blue, while the silver frame hinders the hint of a hidden perspective illusion. Zhang Miao's sophisticated visual language raises the point that the goal of artistic practice is not to manipulate visual momentum and provide the viewer with a false sense of reality; its function lies precisely in encouraging the viewer to leave the image after being immersed in it. Color plays a vital role in achieving this goal. On the one hand, the artist tries to highlight the subtle movement of color under the light (which he calls "without line"). On the other hand, he uses heavy sculptural forms and materiality (which he calls "with outline," but sometimes thinks these two terms might be the same) to capture the escaping colors. This balancing act requires him to mediate between various psychological senses: distance, proximity, coolness, warmth, excitement, and silence. The artist's practice is thus linked in a chain of coherence and negation - or rather, a twisted variation.

In series such as "Seven Snow White and a Dwarf" (2024) and "The Unhearing Seen" (2023) (again, these are mediating, belated, and Sisyphean works of art!), the closeness in shape between the hat, lampshades or umbrellas and the similarity between faces or lamp stand shape their overlap, blending and mutual projection. Zhang Miao considers such overlaps to be "inhabitable," that is, after relinquishing the will to occupy a precise territory - for example, the discursive power to narrate an event - one obtains the freedom to regulate and intervene to various degrees of subtlety. Historiography under a specific ideology determines the framework of human consciousness and actions, and such a deterministic relationship is rich in violence. In Zhang Miao's practice, he abstracts the specific relationship between the contestation of the subjectivity of various subjects and delimits the scope of artistic practice as an arduous labor of modifying degrees, "adverbial" in nature.

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio's "Slow House" (Fig. 1) is one of the sources for the exhibition's title, "Lateness ."(Fig. 1). A door that replaces the front façade of the building and zigzags to a floor-to-ceiling window with an ocean view at the other end of the architecture, the firm considers this house as a "physical entry to an optical departure" for the occupant. However, from studying the architectural model (Fig. 2), Zhang Miao deliberately ignores the viewpoint of the entrance and interprets the "Slow House" as the extraction and condensation of the merged spaces seen through the two side viewpoints, hence, it becomes a "livable" space for the body. The artist's two paintings depicting giraffes, "Lateness," reproduce the overlapping spaces. As viewers move through the gallery, they enter the area divided by the two giraffes' intersecting perspectives and inadvertently end up inside the Slow House, which ultimately fails to realize at the waterfront of Long Island's eastern side.