Brilant Milazimi’s figures inhabit the threshold between dreaming and awakening. Like one or a few dreamwalkers who have escaped from the underground world, the shadowy forms of deboned flesh and skin wiggle and wander, infiltrating our consciousness otherworldly.

Zishi Han’s hanging installations, covered with meticulously well-arranged interlocking metal rings, form some inscrutable sculptures with seemly sturdy metallic surfaces, but in fact, they don’t have any skeletal support, instead whirring in the air with only gravity to support their spatial existence.

Departing from vastly different media and methods, and through deconstructing and reassembling human figures and atmospheric scenes familiar to humanity's collective experiences, the art of Brilant Milazimi and Zishi Han both land in the liminal state of perception, memory, phenomena, and materiality.

For Brilant Milazimi, his art is driven by the unconscious, and the after-image of the long shadow of wars in his homeland Kosovo. With vivid colors and childlike brushstrokes, Milazimi depicts his existential quest, showing his resilience to trauma and resistance against violence and oblivion. His Chinese contemporary Zishi Han is excited about exploring the sensory experiences through the physical structure of his creations. Like a stalker, he roams among different zones, wire-walking at the thresholds of power structure.

Milazimi was born in the post-Cold War Balkans, where perpetual wars in history and present have forged the destiny of a small country caught between larger powers. Accumulated in his paintings are always figures of mere flesh-blood-skin sacs who are suppressed, isolated, stripped of their skeleton and suspended in midair. Their faces are often simplified into a set of dense teeth resembling Dracula the vampire, and a pair of widely opened pupils, as if jolted awake by the terror of a sudden assault, staring directly at the viewer. Across his canvases flow continuously the tradition of Expressionism’s inquiry into the human psyche since Edward Munch; and the Giacometti-esque lines for human contours yelling for presenting the state of life. Milazimi paints with glaring colors of rainbows as if to illuminate the darkness of human souls. His almost childlike naïve brushstrokes are his defense against the brutality and disorder of the world.

Han's practice encompasses various media including sculpture, installation, sound, and video. A engineerturned-artist, his professional sensitivity to materials and space interconnects these seemingly unrelated works. Han is able to transform the exhibition space into a testing ground for the penetrative power of the material and the immaterial elements, such as metal and sound waves. As we watch the muted speaking figure and disoriented moth on the projection screen, a visceral vibration created through the whirring sculptural forms made of chains and metal, our habitual perception is being pushed away by this unsettling ambiguity, towards somewhere uncanny and strange.

If Milazimi tries to install a nightlight in the black hole of the human psyche with his melancholic, curious yet humorous and warm-hearted paintings, then Han is trying to figure out the spatial possibilities of the physicality of human bodies through metaphors of chains, underneath which he declares a personal resistance against the disciplinary mechanisms.

The title of the exhibition, Deboning, borrows from a specialized skill employed by professional chefs when they remove bones from meat while keeping the meat in its original shape. The metaphor lies in the highly precise execution of the artists in the process of art-making to manifest humanity. Each artist, in their own way, commits to the mission bestowed by art: revealing the essence of the human condition and social reality

-Kaimei Wang

https://www.brownieproject.org/