Pareidolia: Margarita Galandina, Cheuk Yiu Lo, and Mengmeng Zhang

Mandy Zhang Art presents Pareidolia, a group show of the artists Margarita Galandina, Cheuk Yiu Lo, and Mengmeng Zhang. Running between 12 March and 17 April 2025, the exhibition will showcase a series of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs that respond to the artists’ personal experiences of migration and memory. Throughout, Pareidolia displays different approaches to figuration rooted in the artists’ investigations into their place of origin, shedding light on the interplay between cultural heritage and self-portraits.

The exhibition takes its title from pareidolia—the psychological tendency to perceive familiar images, such as faces or recognizable forms, within random or ambiguous visual patterns. This phenomenon plays a central role in the works on display, particularly in Lo’s sculptures, which are shaped by the natural characteristics of her materials. Lo allows the inherent shape, grain, and texture of the wood to guide her carving process: in The Silent Dress (2024), the ribbed surface of the wood accentuates the folds in the subject’s garment, making them appear as though organically emerged rather than sculpted. Throughout the exhibition, fleeting images seem to materialize and dissolve within the very substances that compose them, engaging visitors in an experience that mirrors the cognitive mechanisms of pareidolia. A carved jockey appears to leap forward from the confines of a traditional Chinese frame, as though breaking free from the rigid structure that once enclosed it. Fluid, gestural lines trace and reconfigure bodies across Galandina’s drawings, creating forms that oscillate between recognition and abstraction. Meanwhile, Zhang’s paintings capture vanishing figures, their contours blurring into the backgrounds. Beneath these fleeting forms lies a deeper engagement with biography and anthropology, as each artist turns to their cultural origins to investigate the ways identity is constructed, inherited, and transformed.

This inquiry is at the core of Galandina’s practice, which involves meticulous research into her Buryat-Mongolian heritage. By combining archival study, ethnographic documentation, and personal exploration, she examines the visual and historical narratives surrounding the indigenous Siberian people of Buryatia. Her drawings and paintings, informed by extensive study of physiognomic archives in Mongolia, challenge conventional associations between likeness and cultural identity. Pareidolia itself arises from the brain’s need to impose order on the world through associative processes—processes that are, in turn, shaped by personal experience. The artists in Pareidolia mirror this cognitive impulse, drawing upon the visual language and lived experiences of their homelands to construct representations of self. Yet rather than reinforcing cultural determinism, their works reflect on the delicate balance between honoring the past and embracing transformation.

This interplay between tradition and reinvention is made explicit in Heritage in Motion (2024), where Lo repurposes a traditional Chinese frame sourced from Fujian province. Though structurally rooted in her nation’s artistic heritage, the work reimagines the frame not as a rigid boundary but as a foundation from which new forms emerge. Similarly, Zhang’s painting Long Before I Depart captures a fleeting childhood memory of her mother cycling her home from school. Yet the viewer is only granted a fragment of the scene—her figures already in motion, partially vanishing beyond the picture plane. The deliberate geographical and temporal ambiguity of Zhang’s work underscores the transient nature of memory, suggesting that personal histories, much like visual impressions, are never entirely fixed.

By interweaving personal and collective memory, the artists in Pareidolia expand the concept beyond a perceptual phenomenon, embedding it with layers of historical and emotional resonance. Their works ultimately offer a meditation on identity’s fluidity—how it is continuously shaped by cultural inheritance, yet never entirely bound by it. In doing so, they highlight the reciprocal nature of perception: we project meaning onto the images we encounter, just as we ourselves are shaped by the histories and traditions we inherit. Yet, this process is not always immediately perceptible. Instead, it lingers in echoes, waiting for the viewer to discern its presence.