The works of Los Angeles-based artist Charlotte Zhang are inscribed with the histories of petty criminals, rogues, ruffians, and indeed tireslashers – her contemporary variant on labels found as far back as Elizabethan Era moralizing “rogue” pamphlets. Such outlaws, she observes, threaten ideas of property and propriety that have long defined upright members of society; and yet, they also personify the fantasy of individualism and heroic citizenship. The rogue is both damned and heroized. The coney and the coney catcher are two sides of the same coin.
Two bodies of work are set in a dynamic relation in this gallery: Bloodsport/Playground Rules (2023—ongoing), a series of sculptures ‘ready-made’ by removing public bench dividers engineered to prevent people from lying down; together with Rogue Pamphlets (2025—ongoing), a new series of hand-sewn collages composed of images printed on fabric using the sublimation dye technique – a visual language that grew out of the mentorship Zhang received from Kandis Williams, artist and founder of the publishing platform Cassandra Press.
Zhang’s picaresque imaginary is further set in motion in her first feature film, Tycoon – set to premiere at The Polygon Gallery on February 12, 2026 – which the artist describes as “a deconstructed hard-boiled mystery about two young grifters coming of age against the backdrop of a near-future Los Angeles, marred by Olympics turmoil and cockroach conspiracies.”
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Exhibition Audio Guides on Bloomberg Connects
About the Artist
Born in 1999 and based in British Columbia until moving to Los Angeles to pursue studies at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Charlotte Zhang was the 2021 winner of the Phillip B. Lind Prize for Emerging Artists at The Polygon Gallery. Her videos, collages, and sculptural work have since been shown internationally, including festival screenings in New York, Chicago, and Berlin. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Paradise Holds Itself Shut at Goes to Ocean and Ordinary Disasters, Critical Mass (with Tania Collette B.) at Melrose Botanical Garden, both in Los Angeles in 2023. Group exhibitions include Cassandra Press: On Self-Defense – A Cassandra Press Reader In Action at Bergen Kunsthal in Bergen, Norway in 2022; and Scupper, guest curated by Carlos Agredano, at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, CA, USA in 2024.
Curated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator
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