i am composing this piece of writing with the hope that it will suffice as a quasi press release, at least a different kind, while still offering information and attitudes embedded in the exhibition with :mentalKLINIK and Caitlyn Min-ji Au, who each contributed one work for the show.
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i visited istanbul four times within 8 months. the city deeply fascinates me. maybe it is what one would call liminal. the character hovers, until the end of each of my visits, which makes me reflect on movement, the vicinity and the distance to eu, stability, as well as fun. i saw shows by janine antoni, franz erhard walther (arter) and doug aitken (gorusan contemporary), and am humbled by the seriousness of the exhibitions. works embraced me, at times repelling too, and i thought had to follow them to the extent i could. i did. i wanted to respect the artists and the institutions. curiously, the exhibitions made me consider the differences between institutions in istanbul and those in china and the usa. and between me in istanbul (vacation) and me elsewhere (living).

after my latest visit to istanbul in july 2025, i left for belgrade as ada traveled further east to see family in beijing. i had not realized, until i landed in serbia, that an important episode, still memorable to me, happened in belgrade in 1999, when nato bombed the chinese embassy allegedly by mistake, killing three chinese journalists. i was somewhat of a child at that time, but i knew friends skipping school to try protesting outside the us embassy in shanghai, only to find themselves asked to add their names to a long list of predecessors in such an attempt.

belgrade reminded me of berlin, or at least some parts of it. people were interesting, and interested. it was by chance that i saw the exhibition at eugster || belgrade, a gallery ten minutes by car from city center. i went because the exhibition title intrigued me, and it was something like “the gallery is in between shows.” i remembered asking myself why pitch the tent in capturing the temporary? was it a form of institutionalizing the time of the year, which was the summer, aka in-between shows anyway? (i found my summer days in belgrade enjoyable, although i did not swim by ada ciganlija. i wish i did!) or, was it a willingness to recognize the condition of the being? (i am told that serbia maintains the policy of military neutrality as it seeks to gain membership in the eu.) in the show, :mentalKLINIK’s lazy works stood out due to the casual gesture, seemingly quick, and conventional materials, definitely cheap, including the packing stuff which should, essentially, subscribe to utilitarianism. and nothing more. the lazy works did not fetish anything, and in my view, it has become almost impossible to abstain from metaphor/analogy/simile in contemporary art. in other words, the lazy works prompted me to think, to stay with the work, but i did not know what to think about or how to deal with that kind of uncertainty. yet, i dwelled on the work, and its surroundings, like the foam core, the plastic wrappings, the hidden nails, the holes in the walls, the holes in the streets, as well as the edges. when tamara invited me to their neat storage space, i saw the remainder of the lazy works series. i thought, how nice would it be if i could present them for my fall exhibition at the state viii project. i did not propose a loan immediately for the following reasons. a) it would be rude, and i did not come with such an intention; b) i very much appreciated my conversation with tamara and wanted them to tell me more about the gallery, the artists, the city, and the world, all of which inform the condition of art; c) i was reminded of mckinzie trotta’s quip that what would happen would ultimately happen, so the ideas around chance might be over-rated in the first place (and the last).

after returning to the usa, i asked for more information via email. (to be transparent, i did want to buy the work in the gallery but decided that i needed more than one to be faithful to the series; so, i focused on coming up with the money.) tamara, again, exhibited such professionalism and patience during our email correspondence. i was surprised by their curiosity in the work i do at the state viii project in chicago. if i may paraphrase her words, she said something along the line that eugster ||belgrade turned the gallery into an office storage for the summer show, and i turned my office storage studio into an exhibition site. it was very nice of them to show interest in the state viii project. i treasured their remark, and ultimately asked if the gallery would lend me some works.

fast forward: they did, and sent me everything they still had from the lazy works series. so here we are. the lazy works series plus a sculpture from Caitlyn Min-ji Au, a chicago-based artist. (text by tpq)