Impulse /// Face to Face: December 2025

by Impulse, December 31, 2025 read article

KETTY ZHANG

Ketty Zhang, so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, 2025. Inkjet photo, acrylic paint, resin, jade stone, beads, 9.5 x 7 x 1.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.

A light breeze carries the scent of distant incense sticks, just as the crickets slow down into a gentle rhythm along with the flutter of wings and broken chirps from the trees above; wet stones lay a path through a bed of grass to a shrine up ahead. This is not the environment we are allowed in our corporatized, concrete-bound lives of traffic noises and the fleeting comforts of matcha lattes. Shrines today are relegated to white-walled interiors, rather than surrounded by natural splendor. Ketty Zhang envisions new private structures for a new mode of prayer.   

Zhang’s constructions are fed with adornments and offerings, leaning towards a service for the object, rather than the object as service provider. Almost through a religious act, without the burden of strict universal dictums, these pieces open up a space for personal projections, aspirations, and intimate dialogues. As we live on in this post-Labubu era steeped in extremist oppositions, luxury pop, and pointless functionality, to merely be in the presence of such an object could be a revolutionary act. They also play a unique role in tracing lines between desire and devotion, meeting somewhere in the middle and constantly negotiating a balance. As much as the fetishization of a certain element can produce a sense of power emanating from within it, and however central this may be to the urges underlying desire and devotion, they also have to do with an understanding of power. Do we submit to the artifact, or do we crave a certain control over it? 

Ketty Zhang, Bated Breath, 2025. Acrylic, used music box. 5.25 x 6 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Shrines and altars are conduits to a world beyond ours. They are portals of communion and communication. She speaks of these as containment, but what exactly is being contained? Not any one thing, that is for sure. Zhang’s practice demonstrates a profound diversity of ideas through her inquisitive exploration of objects as vessels of cultural memory and emotional resonance. Her work navigates the space between mythical longing and material reality, invoking references such as Chinese fables to examine the precarity of existing between known and unknown worlds. This exploration extends to intimate domestic artifacts, where an autographed photo of actress Chu Hai-Ling and her mother’s teaching worksheets become portals into her parents’ immigrant experience—capturing both their former vitality and the strength required to build new lives.   

In other works, assemblages of grading sheets, magazine clippings, stamps, abalone shells, choir music, and religious bookmarks create layered narratives that move fluidly between personal history and collective diasporic experience. Through these carefully selected objects, from traditional Chinese medicine materials to Christian and Yoruba spiritual texts, she investigates how displaced identities find expression in the accumulation of cultural fragments, examining belonging, placelessness, and the multifaceted nature of spiritual and cultural inheritance across generations and geographies.  

The contemporary altar is as much a nightmare as it is an essential escape from fast-paced consumerism. Whether one looks at these as a pantheon of well-crafted satire, or the foundations of something far larger beyond material understanding, what may remain true is their place in the arts today.  — Abbas Malakar