june 4 - 27, 2026

Nine Gallery

Yuyang Zhang’s everything makes me unconscious parodies his lived experience as a queer Chinese alien through pop culture iconography and internet brainrot. Invited by Nine Gallery member Ellen George, Zhang’s new exhibition features latest paintings that depict iconic celebrity moments, viral memes, and personal images to enact campy melodramas about the contradictions of the United States as depicted overseas with its present reality.

Growing up abroad, Zhang was surrounded by shimmering advertisements for the American lifestyle. The promise of a brighter future soon gave way to the harsh realities of the immigration gauntlet, exclusionary policies, and extreme political and cultural divides.

In response, Zhang uses camp, absurdity, and humor as creative resistance against dread. His paintings collide sacred objects with kitsch, intimacy with satire, ennui with playful excess. everything makes me unconscious depicts the United States in the cruel, comedic fullness of its hypocrisies. Here, we are doomed not just to repeat mistakes but to commodify them for mass consumption. Nuances are necessarily flattened, and the boundary between politics and entertainment blur more and more every second.