How a Beijing Artist Uses Geography and Geometry to Break Down Social Boundaries

Titled “BORDERLESS,” the exhibition is premised on Zhou’s sense that contemporary life is defined by boundaries. Land and sea are carved into (often disputed) territories. People are divided into groups and defined by their educational, economic, and social standing, not to mention their gender, sexual orientation, and skin color. Political districts and neighborhoods are continuously mapped and re-drawn. Hardly anywhere are these ever-shifting borders more apparent than in such rapidly modernizing cities as Zhou’s native Beijing, where international, political, economic, environmental, and social forces are radically reshaping this ancient capital into a 21st-century megalopolis.

These concerns, combined with his interest in Zen Buddhism and its tenet that everything contains its own opposite, feed into the works on view. Among them is Black Order (2015), one of several map- and globe-based pieces in the exhibition, which consists of a large-scale, full-color map of the world, almost entirely blacked out by a grid of jet-black squares. The thin, colorful lines running between these squares, and giving shape to the grid, are all that can be seen of the map itself, made useless by the artist’s interventions.