In "What Is the Contemporary?," Giorgio Agamben offers a counterintuitive definition: modernity refers to a state of conforming to trends and pursuing progress and illumination, whereas contemporaneity is a Nietzschean form of "untimeliness." The contemporary never fully coincides with their time. Rather, the truly contemporary are those who do not conform to the demands of the age, but instead maintain a "disjunction" that allows them to perceive and grasp the present. ¹ In the exhibition "Everything is on time, only time was never ours.", Liu Ren and Zhang Ruyi precisely anchor this untimeliness of the present. The notion of "being on time" here essentially alludes to the cold rules imposed by systems of industrialization and modernity. Within the space of Yuz Museum, the two artists employ their own material rhetoric—whether inexpensive straw paper, fragile eggshells, resilient cacti, or unyielding cement and scratched greenhouse film—to reclaim individual dignity that has been obscured bec
ause time is "never ours."
The exhibition "Everything is on time, only time was never ours." opens with a glass room wrapped in greenhouse film. In agriculture, plastic film marked by industrial traces serves as a cheap layer of protection; in Zhang's context, it becomes a spatial pause. The film and the cactus spines interspersed within it tremble faintly in the interplay of light and shadow, forming an ambiguous and unreachable barrier between the viewers and the natural landscape outside the window. The transparent membrane covering the walls and glass subtly rescales the space. The work Speak Softly (Wild Grasses) (2026) mimics a certain postmodern trace of tears in the museum's shifting light, outlining the unstable, hesitant individual emotion.
Beneath this transparent skin, Liu's early installation Seeking Security (2006-2007) constructs another kind of narrative of metabolism and fragility. At the center of the gallery, thousands of fragile eggshells drift aimlessly upon a shallow pool, each inscribed with neatly handwritten words from a College English Test Band-4 vocabulary list. As the eggshell—the primal vessel of life-carries the imprint of a global language, its tiny, brittle materiality blends with institutional language to compose an absurd drama about the individual seeking refuge within a collective context.
The transparent film extends from the walls to the floor. In a corner of the gallery, a rectangular transparent barrier interrupts the smooth surface of the floor. Beneath it lies a cement cactus stem threaded with wiresthis perfectly embedded patch of earth seems like the cactus's natural habitat. In another work, Modern Fossil (Pipe) - 3 (2022), Zhang places the cactus in a different trajectory. Escaping discipline, it grows wildly alongside fishhooks and drainage pipes. When invisible cement powder meets water and solidifies into a hardened form, emerging like a cactus extruded from a pipe, Victor Hugo's remark that "the sewer is the conscience of the city" ² finds a concrete embodiment. Such combinations metaphorically evoke how life is disciplined and compressed in the pursuit of modernization. Desire drives the expansion of the city—at the cost of living bodies being squeezed into fossil-like remains.
The city is only the desert in disguise. ³ In response, the artists choose to construct a greenhouse and expose the most fragile materials within it. Eggshells, shed spines, and cacti connected to drainage channels are originally the metabolic remnants of life dirt left behind after the city's operational l
ogic has run its course. Mary Douglas argues that dirt is "matter out of place," which "appears as a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications." ⁴ Yet here, these materials seem to regain vitality in their "afterlife." Liberated from discipline and compression, they acquire an aura of dignity under the harsh daylight. Implicit here is spiritual persistence amid humble circumstances: the ideal trajectories painstakingly inscribed inside eggshells, together with cacti stubbornly growing from cracks, reveal the individual's helplessness, irony, and resilience within the larger system.
A wooden framework conceived jointly by the two artists serves as the structural logic of the exhibition space. The grid is a recurring motif in Zhang's practice: from the coordinate points on graph paper used for precise cactus sketches, to the overlapping structures in her planar works, and finally to mosaic tiles and gridded metal frameworks, it evolves from a tool into an ontological presence. From Liu's perspective, the grid-like wooden beams symbolize a cage. By lifting his video work Arena / 2011.10.01 (2011) above eye level, he translates the invisible enclosure that traps the crickets in the video into a physical part of the exhibition's architecture.
From roughly the seventeenth century onward, as industry flourished in newly settled frontiers, many cities rose according to grid-based planning, consolidating an urban civilization grounded in rationality. The intersecting wooden lines in the exhibition reflect the artists' close observation of their surroundings. On one hand, they simulate the "precision" of industrial production lines, offering a sense of order as consolation amid the turbulence of contemporary life. On the other hand, they hint at the anxiety of being "off the grid." As this element develops further, the exhibition's physical structure reveals a movement path that
progresses from the outside inward, from sparsity to density.
The uncertainty and friction inherent in modern systems are given a more dynamic visual translation by the unsettling "cyclone wall" at the entrance to the other gallery. The swirling toilet vortex in Liu's new work interlocks with the slow rotation of an old outdoor air-conditioning unit in Zhang's piece, producing a shared tension rooted in everyday life. This cyclical, mechanical repetition not only suggests the cruel metabolism of the city, but also alludes to Liu's view of technology as a contemporary "new religion" that exerts absolute control over individual time.
Behind these mechanical cycles, Liu unearths the dread that technology brings to human beings. Stemming from his ongoing attention to the MH370 disappearance, Liu created the work Missing (2014), from which he later developed another piece, Notice of Missing Work (2026). Unlike typical disasters, this "unfinished" incident that captured global attention represents the pinnacle of humanity's efforts to defy gravity and dominate natureonly to encounter total loss of control in midair. Its absurdity naturally bled into cyberspace: the airline's official homepage satirically altered by internet users went viral across social media. By translating this fleeting, fragmented digital information into hand-written marks on straw paper, Liu's Missing re-solidifies the tragedy—once alienated by the system into casual chatter—into testimony with tangible material presence. Yet the work itself, which was meant to be exhibited, also went missing in the real world. Thus, Liu created Notice of Missing Work to mark and respond to this double disappearance. In I'm About to Take Off (2026), this narrative translation becomes more tender and more cruel at the same time. The composition mimics the window view from an airplane, while the text derives from the final farewell of a passenger, alluding to an irreversible fate. This returns to the exhibition's ultimate proposition: within a system that pursues absolute punctuality, the individual may, due to a sudden systemic glitch, lose their own time forever.
Through his series Forbidden Fruit (2018-2026), Liu further explores the entanglement of technology and faith in the modern context. For him, the "apple" is a symbol of immense tension: it is the origin of sin that awakened knowledge in Eden, the catalyst for Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity, and the technological system from which contemporary people can hardly detach themselves. In this series, these layered meanings are cast into unreadable publications covered in gold foil. In Spark - Little Boy (2023), an apple core made from straw pulp is suspended from a fishing rod, resembling a perilous bait. This narrative reveals a profound paradox: through technology humanity has been unshackled from gravity and gained seemingly formidable power, yet amid its expanding desire it has completely lost control over its own destiny. The resin sculpture Diazepam (2016) further validates this anxiety, delving into the individual's interior landscape under systemic pressure. Diazepam pills are sealed within a transparent resin skull, completing a monumental transformation in search of a semblance of immortality, while pointing to a psychological state taken over by industrial technology.
Two parallel motifs of rotation appear in the gallery. One refers to the flight engine at the apex of civilization, suggesting the individual's passive, uncontrollable entanglement into a system that seems punctual. The other lowers the viewpoint into the depths of private space: through the whirlpool of a toilet and the mechanical rhythm of an outdoor air-conditioning unit, it excavates the wear and tear that urban metabolism inflicts on human existence. The practice of Zhang mirrors another quasi-religious obsession in our time: industrialization. Against the contemporary backdrop where "development is justice," Zhang opts for a material language that is static, slow, and rugged. In the two-dimensional works of her latest series Polishing, materials such as sandpaper, copper wire, nylon mesh, and printed matter evoke actions of grinding, repairing, and sealing that shape the individual during urban development. In the Matte Substance series, which is not featured in the exhibition, she turns her attention to gravel and debris destined to be erased by rapid urban metabolism, transforming them into physical presence that resists oblivion. As desire drives the city to expand upward, even attempting to claim the future itself, the artist's resistance to speed emerges through the "waste" left upon the ground.
In grafting organic matter into construction waste, Zhang indirectly raises a question about the costs of modernity. The interlocking of the two vortices seems to lead to the unsettling notion of "plus-de-jouir" termed by Jacques Lacan —a structural residue, a libidinal "interest" generated by the circular movement of the drive following the subject's loss of primordial enjoyment. ⁵ For Slavoj Žižek, this enjoyment is not merely a leftover of the subject's desire, but the core kinetic energy that sustains the capitalist discourse, enabling the subject to continuously produce a specific pleasure of pursuit through the very process of constantly missing fulfillment. ⁶ The desires of modernity are often accompanied by overproduction and redundancy. Straw paper, eggshells, shed cactus spines, and construction debris stand for those things destined to be erased. Yet in the artists' views, they are material testimony to vitality. Here, "surplus" no longer signifies redundant demand, but rather a solemn affirmation of life's own dignity and autonomy.
Liu's practice likewise reaches into the depths of life and memory. He chooses inexpensive, disposable straw paper, and reinforces it layer by layer through traditional Chinese mounting techniques so that it acquires a monument-like solidity akin to bricks. Upon undulating surfaces clad in gold foil or oil paint, he handwrites verses by Li Yu, Su Shi, or his own poetry. A meticulously sharpened clock hand sweeps across the text; whether advancing or receding, its trajectory offers both a consolation for the irrecoverable consumption of individual energy and a footnote to the void and melancholy of human life.
In his works, time is transformed into the image of the sea, while water becomes the most ancient metonym for flux and impermanence. Obsessed with deconstructing time via metaphorical lenses, Liu repeatedly inscribes Heraclitus's dictum Panta Rhei (the ever-changing nature of existence) across straw paper flickering with gold foil. This binary of gold foil and straw paper recurs throughout his practice, revealing a stark truth: any brilliance or precision within civilization is invariably anchored to the humble, fragile consumption of everyday life.
The artist's superposition of imagery recalls Walter Benjamin's notion of the "dialectical image" (dialektisches Bild): a conceptual image that crystallizes at the moment when present time (Jetztzeit) intersects with specific historical fragments like ruins, poems, or major events. ⁷ In the Golden Time series (2018), Liu juxtaposes the personal "Computer" with the anonymous "You" that represents the millions who have contributed user-generated content. The two were each named Time's feature "Machine/Man of the Year," nearly thirty years apart. The dialectical image thus holds together disparate historical moments, disrupting the linear narrative of progress and bridging ancient texts and contemporary events within the same dimension. Between fragmented information and grand narratives, Liu tries to establish a dialogue across time and space. In this sense, his expansive list of "collaborators" includes, among others, On Kawara, Heraclitus, Li Yu, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Su Shi, Wang Zhenbai, as well as Chinese artists of his own time.
As Agamben stresses, "it is essential that we manage to be in some way contemporaries to these texts, whose authors are many centuries removed from us." In How Much Land Does a Man Need (2013), Liu transcribes onto mounted straw paper Tolstoy's absurd parable of desire and finality. In the story, Pahom wins his land precisely on time, yet after dying of exhaustion, he ultimately possesses nothing more than the six feet of earth required to bury him. This drastic contraction in physical scale proves the emptiness of life itself. Such quantification of limits appears again in S / 9.58 (2013), where Usain Bolt's world record is condensed into a tiny straw-paper brick set within a long wall, revealing how feeble a human breakthrough appears against the vast and indifferent passage of time.
We win the land, yet lose time forever. Our lives are precisely embedded within grids, bu
t the "surplus" of life continues to slip through their gaps. In measuring time and distance, Liu defies the myth of technological efficiency through extreme manual labor, whereas Zhang estranges materials so that minute everyday remnants become entangled with vast social structures. In works such as Submerged Landscape - 3 (2023) and Circular Ruin (2023), her aquarium installations refract reversals and displacements of scale through transparent glass. In Weaving Shadow (2022-2026), a nine-meter wet plate photography work expanded for this exhibition, Zhang extracts cactus spines from their main bodies, and then enlarges and translates them into pale portraits on a black glass background. These marginalized materials are thus granted a new quality akin to the freedom of marine life, or the depth of a starry sky.
This material logic likewise extends to Zhang's treatment of everyday objects. She uses ceramic tiles to link the "surface" and the "interior" of urban architecture, alluding to the way the industrialized external world infiltrates and shapes the interior of the individual. Sinks, floor drains, sockets, and water pipes no longer function simply as utilities. Blocked, cut, or cast presented in heterogenized forms-they either take on dual meanings in works such as A Failed Container (2026), or transform into defensive "modern fossils." One can say that the entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archeology; an archeology that does not, however, regress to a historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living. ⁸ In Building Opposite Building - 2 (2016), two miniature concrete structures are bound together at zero distance. The windows, which are originally channels for communication, are completely shut and sealed face-to-face. This extreme physical compression not only evokes the breakdown of communication within contemporary urban communities, but also reveals more profoundly how the desires of modernity through upward construction and downward collapse-have left invisible wounds of alienation born of distance.
Contemporaneity is never a synchronous resonance with the era, but a sharp form of "disjunction"—one that remains close to the time while maintaining a critical distance from it. The exhibition title "Everything is on time, only time was never ours." is the perfect rhetoric for this state of rupture. "Being on time" is the dazzling glow cast by systems of modernization and industrialization, demanding efficiency, precision, and uniform rhythm. The truly contemporary, however, are those who firmly hold their gaze on their own time so as to perceive its darkness. Instead of being blinded by the systems' brilliance, they perceive the "shadow of light" that is approaching us yet has not arrived.
Through the manifesto that "time was never ours," the exhibition reveals its solemn intent: if time cannot be disciplined by a preset "punctuality," it returns to what Agamben describes as its hidden core-the "unlived element in everything that is lived." This inner fissure redirects our gaze from grand narratives toward the "surplus" metabolized and discarded by the system. Liu Ren and Zhang Ruyi do not stop at mourning this "surplus." Through their reconstruction, the materials marginalized because of "being not ours" become the most resilient evidence of life, slowly revealing themselves in the dark.
1. From Giorgio Agamben's essay "What Is the Contemporary?, " collected in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, 2009. The discussions of "contemporaneity" and "the contemporary," as well as Agamben's viewpoints presented in this text, are all drawn from this work.
2. Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Li Dan and Fang Yu. People's Literature Publishing House, 2015.
3. Pynchon, Thomas. V.. Translated by Ye Huanian. Yilin Press, 2003.
4. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Translated by Huang Jianbo, Liu Boyun, and Lu Chen. The Ethnic Publishing House, 2008.
5. See Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
6. See Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Translated by Ji Guangmao. Central Compilation & Translation Press, 2017.
7. See Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
8. Ibid., note 1.
