ANGGREK
Vernissage, Thursday 8 January 2026, 18:00 - 21:00
Turbinenstrasse 46, 8005 Zurich
9 January - 7 February 2026, viewing by appointment only
Request a viewing here
Curated by Dario Veréb
The show brings together three contemporary Chinese artists whose practices in photography, video, and sculpture reflect on displacement, identity, and cultural perception shaped by life abroad.
Rather than presenting China through a Western lens, Gazing Back reverses the perspective, inviting Swiss audiences to encounter how the West is seen, remembered, and questioned from Chinese viewpoints. By foregrounding lived experience over representation, the exhibition creates space for reflection on belonging, migration, and the shifting dynamics of the cultural gaze.
All three artists have lived or worked outside China. Their works do not simply illustrate cultural difference; they emerge from states of distance, memory, and displacement. Here, the West appears not as a fixed place but as something experienced and later questioned. The exhibition is less about explaining China to a Western audience and more about prompting viewers to consider their own position within these exchanges.
Join us for the opening on Thursday, 8 January, from 6–9 PM in Zurich. While the artists will not be present, Dario will guide us through the works and their narratives.
“As a Western curator engaging with Chinese artists and their work, I was acutely aware of the historical weight of the gaze and of the risk of reproducing inherited forms of representation. Rather than positioning these artists as subjects to be interpreted, this exhibition was conceived as a space in which their individual ways of looking take center stage.”
-- Dario Veréb
Zeyuan Ren was born in 1997 and lives and works between Shanghai and Ningbo. Working across video, installation and performance, his practice is rooted in lived experiences of movement between coasts and in states of liminality shaped by geography and history. For Gazing Back, he presents A Kind of Displacement, a video work created after his arrival on the US East Coast that meditates on distance, return and the sea as a connective yet separating force.
Moyan Wang was born in China in 2000 and is currently an MFA student at UNC Chapel Hill. Working with ceramics, painting and sculpture, she explores the intersections of personal experience, cultural memory and generational trauma within the Chinese diaspora. Through materials rich in historical reference, she creates quiet yet powerful metaphors for stories that often remain unspoken.
Follow the conversation between Moyan Wang and the curator here.
Ronghui Chen was born in 1989 and is based in Shanghai. His long term photographic work focuses on the emotional and social impact of China’s urban transformation on individual lives. Combining documentary precision with a poetic visual language, his projects examine marginalization, quiet resilience and everyday experience. For Gazing Back, he presents works from An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, a quiet series produced during his time in the United States that reflects on distance, belonging and subtle tension in everyday life.