Exhibition at Soho Revue: Almost Body – Qian Zhong

Artist Qian Zhong received the Judge’s New Talent Award at The Cass Art Prize 2025 Exhibition. The award, selected by 2025 Guest Judge India Rose James, offered the winner a solo show at Soho Revue in the heart of London. Soho Revue is now pleased to present Almost Body, an exhibition of Zhong’s works that look closely at the body in its shifting state.

Moving bodies dance and weave across the canvases, merging into one another through repeated brushstrokes that build on the linen creative movement even in the texture. Shoulder blades glint, stomachs twist and the spandex fabrics fold; the body is something to be viewed beyond corporeality into something that is not entirely solid, not entirely fixed.

This ephemerality is strengthened in the very rendering of the work. The use of close cropping in photographic style removes the wider context of the scene and creates a sense of ambiguity around the distinction between body, clothing, skin and paint. The texture of the paint too, which has become increasingly important in the artists’ work, further lends to this sense of fractioning between bodies. Certainty dissolves into texture and fragments of paint. Whilst the images themselves may evoke a sense of nostalgia or look familiar, the use of building brushtrokes and texture calls into question the certainty of the image once more, and by extension the boundary of the body.

Nightlife, performance and queer-coded spaces are part of the visual world through which Zhong can create works that speak to the body as a condition rather than an object. It is a site to explore uncertainty, where attraction begins to unravel, desire, glamour, the seductive promise of appearance, joy, strength, and ultimately where the body is no longer clearly defined. These concepts reach their apex in one of the largest works in Zhong’s solo presentation, Almost Body. The wrestling series, rather than connotations of violence, evokes the sensation of bodies colliding, overlapping and becoming increasingly difficult to separate.

She asks what remains of us after desire, and it seems her answer is that bodies become boundaryless. The artist is not interested in displaying a stable body, rather more is interested in the particular moment where it begins to dissolve into something less certain. The clothes glimmer over skin, suggesting impermanence, where tattoos inked onto flesh suggest the opposite, and jewellery carrying symbolic and religious heavy weight dances over a cleavage, suggesting something in between.

Imbued and heavy with meaning, on its way to becoming something else, the bodies in Zhong’s canvases are in the process of becoming, loosened by the brushstrokes themselves, into something freer.

Location: Soho Revue, 14 Greek St, London W1D 4DP

Dates:

• Opening reception: 16^th September 6pm – 8pm
• Exhibition runs: 17^th September – 31^st October 2026

Admission: Free

See more of Qian's work at qianzhongart.com

Image credit: Oxidizing (detail) © Qian Zhong

FIND OUT MORE