Taking its cue from a small but telling “glitch” — a double-tap performed on a sketchpad page as though it were a touchscreen — the exhibition traces how digital behaviours migrate into the body, becoming reflex, habit, and involuntary choreography.
Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Muscle Memory, a solo exhibition by Dylan Doe, curated by Ning Yu. Taking its cue from a small but telling “glitch” — a double-tap performed on a sketchpad page as though it were a touchscreen — the exhibition traces how digital behaviours migrate into the body, becoming reflex, habit, and involuntary choreography.
“As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it.”
— Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
From this ghost gesture, Muscle Memory unfolds as a meditation on quiet trans-human integration: not the spectacle of implants or speculative prosthetics, but the subtle rewiring of attention through repetition. Doe’s paintings hover between fragmented portraiture and still life. Hands, hair, eyes, and lips — primary sites of sensation and contact — appear as anonymous components assembled into loose montages. These bodily fragments suggest presence without resolving into a whole, merging with imagined industrial apparatus that feels at once recognisable and faintly estranged within diorama-like settings.
Across the works, the hand becomes unstable as an emblem of craft and deliberate action. It is overtaken by the jittering finger, multiplied and re-tasked into compulsive, performative gestures — rapid swipes and partial touches that imply a drift into restless autopilot. The eye carries a quieter tension: often a single gaze looks past rather than back, withholding exchange and echoing mediated worlds where looking rarely implies encounter. Hair threads through scenes as if drawn from a machine, a veil-like trace between organic intimacy and engineered drift.
Doe’s process begins in unconscious drawing sessions — rapid marks that operate as discovery and recall rather than premeditated planning. Painted layers accumulate on raw canvas through graduated priming and transparency; the blurred line of the initial sketch remains visible in places as a residue of making. In Muscle Memory, intuition is both method and question: an attempted escape from controlled meaning in a time of cold information, and a stumbling block that asks whether spontaneity can ever fully evade embedded response.
