Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present Anchorage, a solo project by Yuan Zhongyu on 18 July, featuring new installations created this year. Trained in civil engineering and architecture, and shaped by his experiences between Shanghai, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Yuan explores the indeterminate space between the individual and their surroundings, responding to modernity’s peculiar landscapes. In fact, he seeks traces of will and spirituality within the cracks of modernity’s drive toward unity, order, and functionality. His works focus on and amplify the forms, patterns, illumination, and even the unintended imperfections of industrially manufactured objects, transforming these limited moments of “humanized” compromise into idyllic and transcendent motifs.

Upon entering Vanguard Gallery’s Project Space, visitors find themselves in a space suspended between a garden and a roadside construction site. Scattered traffic facilities were altered with traditional Chinese garden elements,  turning the space into a landscape for wandering, pausing, and lingering. “Anchorage” is not a destination. Nor is it a permanent refuge. It tend to create a temporary point of arrival chosen by oneself—a place to pause before continuing onward.

The works function as fragments of this inquiry. Welcome combines a domestic glass lampshade with a streetlight, guiding visitors in. Roadside Assistance #2 merge decorative windows associated with rest and contemplation and temporary traffic signage as visual markers. Carpet and steel cones create Wishing Pond #1, a tranquil corner amid urban motifs. At the center, Anchorage features red lampshades elevated on street poles, resembling pine trees leaning casually against supports, while recalling romanticized stop signs. Nearby, Moss extends from the wall, marking a pause along the pedestrian path.

In recent years, Yuan’s practice has been reflecting his study of Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude, where Virno addresses a fear that can be named, deriving from social and public interactions, and a indefinite anxiety, which arises when one cannot locate oneself within a stable social identity. Yuan’s previous works aim to create an ultimate shelter as a solution toward the predicament individual lives once the collective border vanished, and no place they belongs.

In Anchorage, the artist further questions the meaning of this ultimate shelter and the tendency toward evasion that it represents. One would no longer need to confront indefinite anxiety if one could find an unchanging harbor, an absolute identity, or a system of meaning that promises a once-and-for-all resolution. Yet the fantasy of discovering such a paradise only serves as an illusion, preventing one from moving forward and trapping individuals endlessly within a maze shaped by the limitations of their own experiences.

Therefore, Yuan creates a roadside environment instead—an open and undefined transitional space. As a brief stopping point that offers no permanent solution for drifting souls, it seeks to evoke a consciousness in the viewer: to embrace the freedom of move forward at any moment and bear the weight that comes with it.