In Enabler and vanilla conjuring (纵容者和寻常戏法), Sharon Xinran Zhang invites six artists to participate in her solo exhibition. Their six works, together with nine of her own, form a dialogue, a play of literary devices, or a house party.

How could I possibly express everything You mean to me? I love You so much that it hurts. I love You so much that representation fails. Trying to explain the relationship between me and You is like constructing a sentence out of pictures, or a painting out of perfumes. There is always Too Much To Say.

This is a show of nine + six = fifteen works. I am not one person but multiple; or, rather, I am less-than-one, iterated fifteen times.

First, nine attempts to diagram the failure of reading. For when one is as devoted as I am to You, the world becomes undifferentiated. Deciphering signs according to one language or another is impossible—everything points back to You: the ice in my drink is Your beautiful glass skin, the cross on the wall is the twinkle in Your eye. I catch glimpses of You in strange refractions of color, in textures mutated out of fur, skin, blood, metal, foam, beams of viscous light. You are a code or game or trick that consumes the world and spits it out as pure surface, a scrawl of secret handwriting just for me.

Then there are the six of You. Looking at You makes me want to vomit; no, You ARE my vomit. You are everything I want deep inside me but my body rejects, no matter how much of it I force down my throat. The only way to experience total pleasure is to watch someone else receive it.

I love You, because You are the vessel by which everything that might pass through me is obliterated and then reassembled in its distinct and perfect form. I don’t want to know You. The closer You are, the less I see. I am forever outside, adjacent to, subsidiary, assisting; it is only by virtue of the frame that the painting can be watched, only through the conniving [纵容] voice off screen that the movie can be read.

There is nothing singular about my love; it is beautiful because it is generic, common [寻常]. Everything true is a cliché.

This is a letter from me to You: “diabolical in all its innocence,” like Kafka said.

This is not Sharon speaking. This is not not Sharon speaking. Welcome to our party <3

(Text by Lucia Kan-Sperling, february 2026)