A Disruption, A Continuation

Jiayun Chen, Sining Zhu, Zengyi Zhao, Siyan Camille Ji

April 4 - 19, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 4th | 6-9pm

LA Artcore | 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012

LA Artcore presents A Disruption, A Continuation, a multi-media exhibition featuring work by Jiayun Chen, Siyan Camille Ji, Zengyi Zhao, and Sining Zhu. The continuous flow of time and the consideration of fleeting, everyday moments as ongoing events are the thematic undercurrent that animate the show. The point of creative and philosophical departure for all four artists is the assumption that time is a linear and perpetually forward-moving narrative, and that the accumulation of individual daily “events” determines how straightforward or successful our personal and collective futures will be. The photographic prints, drawings, and installation presented in A Disruption, A Continuation use ephemeral traces of old materials, ideas and places to formally and conceptually propose new models for thinking about how events, memories, places and emotions are constructed. In A Disruption, A Continuation, emotional landscapes, personal narratives, chaotic energy, and material deterioration challenge time’s linear simplicity, opening a space for the fugitive and contingent.

Sining Zhu’s multimedia installation Still A Long Dream—— traces the psychic lives of sites obscured and disrupted by ongoing histories of construction, demolition and gentrification. On the floor, the work is arranged in a structural, semi-gridded layout evoking both an archeological excavation and a construction site. When viewing the installation– which includes concrete, wood, and found objects– one catches themself trying to identify whether they’re looking at something being built or taken apart. This tension and instability are what make Still A Long Dream—— so engaging. Upon careful inspection, skeletal forms take shape within concrete slabs; these ghostly apparitions are the imprints of discarded merchandise from shops in Dynasty Plaza in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, visual manifestations of what Zhu eloquently describes as a "suspense between endurance and erasure.” To the artist, structures like Dynasty Plaza– and the countless objects found within them– are sentient, living unique lives determined by utilitarian use and/or emotional appreciation. But how much value will be given to these objects or places once they can no longer offer use? Will they be discarded as trash, or will they become artifacts? Evading linear narratives of progress and improvement, Zhu’s Still A Long Dream—— instead destabilizes the distinctions between reality and memory, foundation and ruin.

Jiayun Chen’s Wobbly-Legged Rat is an experimental exploration of how personal narratives, poetics, and intuition affect the structure of moments still in flux. Chen’s gestural markmaking and recurring semi-architectural forms make her work energetic, playful, and intriguingly mysterious. She approaches her acrylic “drawings” with the mindset of a sculptor: Many of the works feature strong grounding elements, such as bases, balusters, towers, and “legs” – endearing evidence of a consideration of weight and gravity. The focus of Chen’s conceptual fascination is the idea of non-arrival, or the consideration of something departing from a point but never arriving at a final destination. Within non-arrival is the opportunity to confidently be, rather than be something, a rare space in which Chen finds freedom. At the heart of Wobbly-Legged Rat is what the artist refers to as “personal narratives,” abstract traces of everyday moments that stick with her either consciously or subconsciously. The exhibited series visualizes these traces, similarly to how one observes the passing landscape from a moving car– solid and foundational, yet continually flowing and shifting. A significant question that Wobbly-Legged Rat asks is how our personal narratives affect our ongoing journeys toward the next thing, or if it’s the journey itself that informs our personal narratives. The artist would most likely say that this is an oversimplification. By letting her intuition, instincts, and sculptural approach to markmaking construct a conceptual landscape, Chen reveals kinetic scenes in continuous play, unimpeded by space or time.

Within A Disruption, A Continuation, Zengyi Zhao’s 99.999999999% adopts the widest view on time’s passage and pays special attention to its chaotic tendencies. The focus of the photographic series is the silicon wafer chip, a delicate slice of semiconductor prevalent in everyday electronics, such as phones and computers. Though complex and robust, these nanoscopic systems are highly susceptible to damage; a single miscalculation in the microfabrication process ruins the entire chip. Jagged fragments of damaged wafer chips are arranged against a stark white background in Zhao’s photographs, which are presented at a confrontational scale. The series is piercing and suspenseful when viewed as a chronological narrative; each photo seems to depict a singular split-second moment of an entropic explosion, the broken chips appearing as debris in mid-flight, bursting from a violent overflow of energy. In vividly capturing the shards of a ubiquitous yet invisible microtechnology, 99.999999999% not only acknowledges the material lifecycles of electronics, but also conceptualizes destruction as a living energy system in itself. What’s being challenged is our expectations and attitudes towards the pervasiveness of violence, and the question of violence’s avoidability, or its inevitability. Using light, scale, composition and materiality, Zhao asks us to consider the future chaos within our present actions.

Siyan Camille Ji brings a serene softness to the exhibition as she meditates on reverberating memories as poignant interruptions to linear progressions of time. For the artist, fragments of recollections come back in waves, accumulating layers and merging together to create memoryscapes, emotional spaces where echoes of the past resound. The photographs comprising The Distance Unmeasured are written onto the gallery’s walls like a poem or a code, establishing a welcomed distortion of space and narrative even before one can view the works as individual presentations. The series brings diametrical forms and ideas into visual harmony: the gentle balance between soft and solid, distant and close, cool and warm, interior and exterior give the photographs their dreamlike quality. Ji looks outward from an internal space as thoughtfully as she gazes at natural landscapes with an uncannily familiar eye. Throughout her work is the acknowledgement of mono no aware, a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical concept that recognizes the beauty in the ephemeral and underscores the bittersweetness of time’s passing. The formal and conceptual elements of Ji’s series, as well as its installation in the gallery, echo the idiom’s reverence for fleeting images, past and present alike. Poetic and personal, The Distance Unmeasured quietly proposes an alternative to the dominant conceptualization of time as continually forward-flowing, chronological, and sequential.

It’s often difficult to identify similarities between artists and their artworks in a group exhibition such as A Disruption, A Continuation, so it’s especially impressive that the show’s thematic throughlines speak to relevant issues that are actively dictating our lives and determining our futures on scales both individual and collective. The passage of time is certainly not a new preoccupation within humanity’s philosophical discourse, but recent happenings in our increasingly unstable world are forcing younger generations to reckon with a future disrupted by the climate crisis, threats of nuclear war, and the uncontrollable advancement of artificial intelligence. Everyday we encounter disruptions to the ongoing narrative that is our conscious life; these disruptions can make existence seem fragmented, random, uncontrollable, and chaotic, and imagining what the future may look like is anxiety-inducing. Acknowledging and challenging the conception of time as linear and progressive, the artists in A Disruption, A Continuation ask how we can continue to be, even amidst shifting values and uncertain futures.

Written by Hattie Schultz.