Grunts Rare Books is proud the present Cancer, a solo exhibition by Sharon Xinran Zhang.

"This group of paintings is brought together under the sign of cancer. I don’t know about and distrust the astrological connotation of this title, though it is definitely operating on some level. On another, though, is the disease which, like addiction, turns the body against itself. And some addictions graduate to the level of a cancer, literally. These are facts with a history. And these paintings are astute about their place in history. But, how can a painting that is rather conspicuous about its enthusiasm for abstraction expose the circuitry that only meticulous descriptions, historical narratives, claim to depict? 

I didn’t know until I was told that in one of Xinran "Sharon" Zhang’s paintings is a picture of the vanity desk of an elite college professor whose stock of jewelry and fentanyl are (proudly?) arrayed. I recall reading a lot about the last global pandemic’s way of tracing out the flows of capital and commodities, if you would only follow the sickness and the suffering. (Follow the money, but the money is the suffering. It’s an addiction, really.) Even Prince got hooked, and shortly thereafter the convoluted resentment projected into the Covid narrative via the U.S.’s 'trade war' with China; the dovetailing tales are as vertiginous as they are dialectical. The opium wars of the 19th century are legibly ongoing and distractingly oblique. Zhang’s paintings seem to me to be meticulous and oblique. I think they are also full of suspense, and that suspense suggests that the truth is bound to be revealed—in the image-object itself. To say how, I will go a little ways outside of viewing the paintings themselves, at least initially.

The Asian-American cultural critic Lynn Lu cites the white American poet—considered the very first specifically American poet, and one of the most subversive—Emily Dickinson. Lu turns Dickinson’s most famous line of verse upside down. The line is 'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.' With a nod to the racial slur 'slant-eye,' she compares two jokes, both as lessons in 'slanting the truth.' The first is this laundry detergent commercial from 1970s American television—I am old enough to remember seeing this commercial regularly run on the major networks. Lu interprets the couple running the laundromat as 'laughing to themselves at how easy it is to fool Whitey. This is a time-honored strategy practiced in many marginalized communities, where it is well-known that a little dishonesty can be the best policy for ensuring social harmony…even when they know better,' Lu explains, 'people see and hear only what they want to.' She then retells a dad joke. Her father was a well-known American academic. Once at a conference, her father used to say, a Chinese professor is enjoying his dinner when the 'kindly' and presumably white lady sitting next to him asks, using a caricature of tortured immigrant English, 'Likee soupee?' The man smiles and nods politely. Then he is called to the podium to give a speech, which he does in 'eloquent, flawless English.' He returns to his seat after speaking and asks his neighbor, 'Likee speechee?' Lu says, 'I haven’t come across many ads or jokes like these, where Asians have the last laugh in gentle yet pointed clashes of cultures. Always, it is the Asian who assimilates, who must explain his or her presence and professionalism, who must earn the right to exist and speak…This burden of proof is constant, heavy, and tiresome.' Lu is talking about the lived experience of Orientalism, of othering, and of the aesthetic practices—ads and jokes—that are deployed to cope and, sometimes, to resist.

As for suspense, a good slasher flick will signal, often through the non-diegetic soundtrack, that there’s more than meets the eye. We’ll soon be startled to see what’s what. In an unpublished set of notes on titling his paintings, René Magritte warned against providing 'information' in a title, lest the image be subordinated to an illustrative role. Magritte was also a particularly realist surrealist. Hence, when he declared the relationship between word and image to be 'poetic,' he meant mysterious but there, virtual: 'characteristics of which we are usually unaware…which logic has not yet managed to elucidate… The poetic title has nothing to teach us, but it must surprise us.' And who hasn’t had that epiphanic moment when Magritte’s coaxing title brings the ensemble of objects modeled in the image into focus in such a way as to isolate an ensemble that hid in plain sight until, by reading, we got there? Zhang’s titles work in a similar way. But I think the analogy to Magritte ends there, because Zhang is less phenomenological and more political, and the politics aren’t about weighing doctrines or even calling out injustices. They do, however, not unlike certain historical avant-gardes, attempt to heighten our receptivity by, basically, acting the tease. You shouldn’t try to make the titles work. Let them work on you. Assume the position of quasi-worship; the title of that painting of the intellectual flaunting fentanyl and jewelry? it’s called Devotion. Of course it is!

That’s where the specifically painterly traits come into equipoise with the verbal provocation of the titles. What I see here are several possible reference points: Jae Jarrell’s 'cool-ade colors,' a dispersed version of Mel Bochner’s palette in his synonym paintings, the interrupted, scrawling verbosity of Cy Twombly’s text paintings, and the furling line of Chris Ofili. The rough-hewn facture of Zhang’s paintings provides traction to the mind and models a beleaguered but needed historicism. Maybe not beleaguered, but definitely anxious. Zhang’s work is sly about its decorative features, unabashed about both its abstraction and its figurative thrust, and the artist is super smart about the rubrics under which their works should be viewed (being a seasoned curator, this last aspect is no surprise). In poetry, the title is always the first line, because you read it first. In painting, it’s impossible not to see the image before you draw yourself close enough to read the placard. Somewhere in between is this group of works."

Text by Patrick Durgin.

Sharon Xinran Zhang (b. 2002, Beijing) lives and works in New York and Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include Powder Room Dining Room, a Ladies’ Room (2025) curated by Matt Morris at SkyArt, Chicago; hold (2024) with Fengzee Yang and Janet Lee at Tala, Chicago; and same beast (2024) with Maisie Corl at hardboiled, Chicago. Zhang’s works concerns and translates the excess. Apart from studio practice, Sharon curates and directs the artists-run space, hardboiled, in Chicago. Zhang received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Art History Thesis at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025.

From June 8th to August 17th, Grunts Rare Books will host Grunts Plein Air every Sunday, from 11am-3pm, at the corner of Kedzie and Albany.

Weather permitting, look for a straw umbrella. 

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