Open Field
Press Release
Artist: Sinning Zhu
Rehearsing Space
Open Field is pleased to present Rehearsing Space, a solo presentation of new work by Sining Zhu, as part of our program at TRYST 2026.
We were drawn to Zhu's work because it resists a question we keep returning to in our own curatorial practice: what does it mean for a space, or a body, to be finished? Zhu's practice doesn't offer an answer so much as a method- taking the raw, unresolved condition of a home mid-repair and refusing to let it resolve. Pipe, fittings, wheels, and salvaged material are pulled out of their intended use and reassembled according to a different logic: not architectural code, but the scale of Zhu's own body.
That shift- from standardized measurement to embodied measurement- is what makes this work feel urgent to us right now. So much of how we're taught to think about space, structure, and even our own bodies is inherited from systems we didn't build and don't control. Zhu's work quietly insists on another possibility: that space can be organized around lived, physical experience instead, and that instability isn't a failure state, but a legitimate way of being in the world.
We're presenting Rehearsing Space not as a finished object but as an ongoing rehearsal, in keeping with its title, inviting viewers into a structure that is still, visibly, working itself out.
-Xiaoxiao Wu & Zhang Liang,
Open Field https://www.openfieldplatform.com/
About the Artist
Sining Zhu (China) is a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, video, performance, and sound. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her practice examines how fluid states of identity are inscribed and reshaped within contemporary social structures. Through material reconfiguration, fictionalization, and imaginative misalignment, she investigates how structures sustain experience and how subtle traces are activated across temporal layers. Her work addresses the sedimentation of emotion and memory within environments, with the body operating as a dynamic medium within these conditions. Rather than using narrative to resolve tensions, her practice constructs spatial situations that can be entered and experienced, allowing hidden relationships to surface.
Her work has been presented internationally in Los Angeles, New York, Beijing, and Tokyo, including at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Inside-Out Art Museum, LA Artcore, The Reef LA, and Cevera Yoon Gallery.
Website:https://siningzhustudio.com/
IG: sining_zhu
E-Mail: siningzmail@gmail.com