Jincheng Deng
b. 1995

Selected works
Installation views
Press release

Gymatic
23 May – 13 June 2026

You kick a ball. It rolls away.

You hit a nail. It goes down.

You flick a switch, turn a knob, you are in control. Do these objects then have agency to perform the task your action takes, is your participation as a human ground non-human objects?

In sixteenth-century French humanist François Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), he writes “fais ce que voudras.” Do what thou wilt. Rabelais imagines an anti-hierarchical and antimonastic social structure grounded in freedom, self-governance, and humanist ideals rather than rigid institutional control. While Rabelais was primarily concerned with human liberty and education rather than object-oriented philosophy, the text’s rejection of fixed hierarchies and prescribed relations resonates with contemporary ideas of democratic and non-fixed participation.

But this do what thou wilt mentality grounds Jincheng Deng’s, Gymatic. It urges the human participant to rethink their own hidden reality, taking it also upon non-human objects created by Deng. A dog bowl full of whistles coated in white with an orange tip acting as a cigarette filter, sweat bands chained together like handcuffs, or a turtle soccer ball cast in bronze whizzing around the floor as it gets kicked and passed along. These works come alive when activated, yet it is a further critique on the privilege of human involvement, uncovering the agency of the objects themselves. In this case Deng urges us to become the artwork, the object, positioning viewers not as privileged interpreters but as participants within networks of equal object-to-object relations.

Deng reframes the central act of participation through imagination rather than dialogue, inviting audiences to mentally perform relations between objects and project their own associations, identities, and possible uses onto his installations. Central to his practice is the development of ‘suturing’ as a methodology that replaces relational encounters with manipulated arrangements of everyday objects that expose gaps and tensions between forms, rather than resolving them into fixed meanings. Through uncanny juxtapositions, partial recognisability, and theatrical misplacement, Deng’s works encourage viewers to engage with objects as autonomous entities whose meanings and withdrawn realities remain incomplete and unstable.

But beyond philosophy, what becomes particularly compelling in Deng’s practice is his use of the uncanny. Recognisable everyday forms and functional tools are subtly distorted, dismantled, and recombined. In my mind, this becomes another form of “suturing.” Like a doctor stitching flesh together, Deng sutures objects in ways that allow them to retain their autonomy rather than collapse into purely symbolic devices. There is also a sense of playfulness to these transformations: a wet floor sign bends out of shape and suddenly resembles a Mario Kart banana peel, inhibiting its own function. The sign no longer simply warns of danger - it appears to become the danger itself. Through these interventions, systems of recognition are destabilised, allowing Deng’s objects to generate their own strange and fictional narratives.

Maybe the wet floor sign was never warning us at all, it was just waiting for its chance to finally trip someone over. And in that moment, even caution becomes part of the performance, quietly questioning who, or what, is really in control.

– Solomiya Sywak