Juntao Gao
Phantom Limb No.1 , 2025
Animal traps, carpets, old curtains, metal, casings and lock
120 x 220 x 35 cm
A group exhibition presenting artists who engage with animals, creatures, and hybrid forms as reflections and extensions of lived experience.
Mandy Zhang Art is delighted to announce Common Ground, a group exhibition presenting artists who engage with animals, creatures, and hybrid forms as reflections and extensions of lived experience. Moving between the literal and the symbolic, the works consider how non-human life is imagined and mythologised, revealing shared terrain between instinct, memory, and identity. The exhibition features work by Juntao Gao, Jeanne F. Jalandoni, Kenji Lim, Yuma Radne, Annie Trevorah, Silia Ka Tung, and Lian Zhang, curated by William Gustafsson.
Across the exhibition, creatures appear not simply as subjects, but as carriers of social narratives. Juntao Gao’s sculptural practice examines the tensions between wild essence and social order informed by Qi, the Taoist understanding of a vital life force that animates bodies, matter, and the natural world. The artist adopts the visual language of taxidermy and domestic décor to expose the violence embedded in anthropocentric control and the uneasy domestication of nature.
Jeanne F. Jalandoni’s practice uses animal figures as vessels for cultural memory, care, and ancestral connection. Working across painting and handmade textiles, she centres the Carabao, the national animal of the Philippines, as a hybrid, maternal protagonist that anchors themes of protection, loss, and longing. In this work, the Carabao cradles a rooster, associated with sacrifice and mourning rituals, allowing Jalandoni to reflect on grief, remembrance, and inherited ties to a familial homeland.
Lian Zhang’s work channels hybrid creature forms and surrealistic scenes as entry points into fluid worlds where myth, memory, and identity overlap. The two-headed “symbiotic bird” appearing here is taken from a Buddhist imagery that speaks to a shared fate, interdependence, and coexistence.
Yuma Radne’s paintings construct a universe populated by otherworldly figures moving through imagined environments where composite beings share equal presence with animals. Her works unfold as insights of an ongoing narrative, inviting viewers into a speculative world shaped by her inner vision.
Kenji Lim’s faces hover between human, creature, and object. Embracing anthropomorphism, Lim loosens identity in favour of emotional presence, creating forms that feel intimate yet indeterminate. Made from soft materials and carefully adorned with tassels, beads, and decorative elements, the works echo ornament, ritual and place.
Silia Ka Tung’s practice is defined by soft, organic, and enigmatic forms that showcase unfamiliar creatures born of personal mythology. Her sculptural works occupy an imagined realm, neither clearly a living form nor static object, inviting curiosity and wonder.
Annie Trevorah further explores this interconnectivity through biomorphic forms. In her work, the anatomy of a moth is configured into a human body, producing an ambiguous hybrid in a state of mutation, where vulnerability and agency permeate across species.
Together, the artists in Common Ground have claimed animal and creature forms as shared symbolic terrain through which narratives of connection, transformation, and becoming unfold.