Vanguard Gallery is pleased to present “Crashing Exercises”, Dai Zhankun’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from 29 May 2025. The exhibition features fifteen newly created installations dispersed throughout the gallery, constructing a scene that resembles a ruin. Composed of actual military wreckage, these dark, metallic materials—imbued with a cold industrial presence—are reconfigured by the artist into new forms, gesturing toward how warfare, disguised as training and preparation, parasitizes the shadows of daily life.

Observing the indistinguishable traces left by military and civil aviation, Dai turns his gaze skyward in “Crashing Exercises.” He disassembles and recombines components from aircraft machinery, exposing the mechanisms of infiltration between military and civilian industries. The commercial value embedded in technological innovation has blurred these boundaries, allowing advancements once confined to the military-industrial complex—such as GPS systems and composite armor—to spill seamlessly into civilian life. War disciplines social structures, just as social structures reshape the practices of war, forming an inescapable circular dependency. By magnifying the accidental moments embedded within the everyday, Dai cuts open and intervenes in this cyclical entanglement, amplifying the hidden dimensions of the seemingly ordinary. “Crashing Exercises” raises a Heideggerian question: when civil and military aviation share the same trails across the sky, has daily life itself become a rehearsal space for the aesthetics of war?

Reclaimed military and civil aviation components anchor many of the installations within the exhibition. Dai orchestrates a series of “transplants,” grafting found debris onto 3D-printed parts and everyday objects. Through this dissection, he reveals how the military-industrial complex insinuates itself into the soft tissue of urban life under the guise of “exercises.” In Safety Instructions—you are safe (2024), the fuel tank of a fighter jet and in-flight safety instruction screen form an uncanny symbiosis; in Breathing Principles (2024), ammunition belts are replaced by whipped cream chargers. Each work captures a fragment of the ongoing domestication of violent apparatuses into everyday infrastructures. Through the continuous reconfiguration of salvaged materials and found objects, Dai presents a poetic vantage point: if every part is designed to delay a predetermined fall, is flight merely a postponed crash—and are we not both witnesses and accomplices in this gradual descent?

Dai Zhankun received his Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2017 and earned an MA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, in 2020. His practice often emerges from moments of search or accident, where his cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience unfold within a contemporary context. Dai’s use of readymades and salvaged materials reflects his ongoing effort to dissect reality and expose its underlying structures. With bold concepts and occasional absurdity, he transforms readymades into installations full of metaphor and corrective intent, intervening in the discourse surrounding force and power in a distinct and incisive manner.