Club BJZ by ZIAN is pleased to present Piero Golia & Feng Chen: Exit the Loop, opening in Beijing on May 17, 2025. The exhibition focuses on Piero Golia and Feng Chen’s shared engagement of everyday objects, machinery, and elements of motion. Through perception-based experiments rooted in these components, the artists challenge conventional understandings of physical reality, prompting critical reflection on the authenticity of sensory experience. As the inaugural exhibition of Club BJZ by ZIAN's Beijing project space, it also marks the second in-depth collaboration between the gallery and both artists. At the core of Piero Golia’s practice is the notion of situational sculpture. His use of ready-mades continues the Duchampian conceptual lineage, yet introduces a pronounced sense of transience and performative intervention. In Luminous Sphere (2010), a five-foot-wide glowing orb installed atop the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood. Illuminated only when the artist was physically present in the city, the work created a cryptic, poetic mechanism embedded in the nightscape—simultaneously elusive and ironic. Golia often draws on remnants of past works or life events, constructing a self-referential ecosystem in which new pieces function as annotations, echoes, or continuations of earlier ones. His Comedy of Craft (2014), created for the Hammer Museum Biennial in Los Angeles, was structured as a trilogy of interconnected pieces. In this exhibition, Golia’s new work In for A Penny, In for A Pound (2025) embodies these two core aspects of his practice. It is a reconfiguration from his earlier piece of the same title, previously shown in the group exhibition Shake Rattle Rock Shine at ZIAN Gallery, where a rock tumbler continuously pulling a hammer to repetitively strike one-cent Euro coins. By reassembling mundane objects in illogical combinations, Golia constructs a self-sustaining system of absurd motion. This irrational assembly not only subverts the objects’ utilitarian functions, but also establishes a model of perception lodged within the fissures of reality, driven by mechanical repetition. Notably, In for A Penny, In for A Pound (2025) is conceived as a site-specific piece, adapted in response to the architectural conditions of the Beijing space and its dialogue with Feng Chen’s work. This site-responsiveness reflects Golia’s vision of artworks as open systems—always in flux, perpetually “unfinished,” and responsive to shifting contexts. Feng Chen, meanwhile, builds interactive and game-like environments in which technology is used to reframe the banal. His practice, rooted in keen observation of the material world, continuously probes beneath surface appearances to interrogate deeper truths. In M，he deconstructs the mirror as a domestic object, reengineering it to unsettle ingrained habits of visual perception. As viewers approach, a specially designed acrylic mirror, actuated by mechanical components, warps and distorts the reflected image. The curvature shifts in real-time based on the viewer’s distance, creating a subtle overlap between the real and the virtual. Feng’s new work Chronophobic Light-club continues this inquiry, using low-cost, mass-produced devices to conjure a cosmic imaginary. Customized light fixtures mounted on the ceiling simulate starlight beaming toward the floor, where cameras record the beams and transmit them to monitors in the gallery. Yet what appears on screen is not a celestial tableau, but the silent, unembellished operation of machinery in complete darkness. This recursive gaze—observation observing observation—extends Feng’s ongoing use of image-based media to explore temporality. Through this lens-device dynamic, he dramatizes the paradox of the visible and invisible, transforming light, time, and perception into metaphors for existence and erasure. Both Golia and Feng Chen employ a minimalist sensibility and formal precision. Their mutual affinity for ready-mades and emphasis on geometric qualities lend the exhibition a visually austere clarity. Yet beneath this restraint lies a persistent return to material systems and their internal logic—a loop whose simplicity reveals its own dependencies. In their hands, the minimalist utopia becomes an open, contemporary system: one in which the assemblage of everyday components defies rational logic, evoking the poetic absurdity of lived experience; and one that shifts attention away from objects themselves toward the dynamic interplay between object, viewer, space, and time. Exit the Loop thus functions as both an extension of the “less is more” ethos and an acknowledgment of art’s role as a conduit for energy, information, and perceptual flow.