Second Order: Ante Room Takeover By Vivien Zhang
— The Arts Club, London 14 September 2026 — 24 January 2027

London-based artist Vivien Zhang presents Second Order, a site-specific takeover of The Arts Club’s Ante Room, transforming the space into an immersive environment that extends her painting practice beyond the canvas. Bringing together paintings, a bespoke, site-specific wallpaper design, and works on paper – referred to by the artist as ‘maquettes’ – the installation draws visitors into a densely layered world of Zhang’s construction.

Zhang builds her paintings from a vocabulary of cartography and map projections, physics, botanical classification, the study of butterflies, and decorative traditions. Layering oil, acrylic and spray paint through processes shaped by digital imaging, she works these motifs into compositions that behave less like landscapes than like topographies: surfaces where forms repeat, slip out of register and imitate their neighbours until the eye can no longer tell a citation from a copy. The result is a sustained interrogation of the linguistic, visual and taxonomic systems by which we sort the world, and of how readily those systems fail.

Second Order marks a significant moment for the artist in which she showcases the different components of her practice in one place, offering an encounter with work that is both materially complex and conceptually rigorous.

Special thanks to the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery for this extraordinary installation.