CHENG Yuzheng: Life on Mars

REFLEXION is pleased to present “Life on Mars,” a solo exhibition by artist CHENG Yuzheng, opening on May 16, 2026. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo show at REFLEXION and also his debut solo exhibition in Beijing.

“Fin de siècle” was a common phrase in the years leading up to 2000, as if time itself would come to a reckoning with the world at that moment. From there on, along the arrow of time, everything in sight would belong to the future.

The Y2K bug would be the first problem carried over from the past into the future; Microsoft was imagined as an empire spanning the surface of the earth. Pessimists believed that environment, resources, and unending wars would converge into a final, summarizing moment, that the world would collapse in accordance with the prophecies of Nostradamus. Yet an optimist like Stanley Kubrick had already envisioned, with precision, a year later – in 2001 – looking back at Earth from outer space.

From the cloud, looking down.

Seen from that height, how small human beings appear. Even someone as great as Michelangelo – bent over, eyes strained, body and mind exhausted – found himself entangled with pigment and brushstroke, suffused with anxiety and unease, writing in a letter: “Painting has become my shame.”

And yet, it is precisely this human condition that grants things an irreplaceable necessity. But is it truly irreplaceable? Even the cloud has become Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure… The answers we await from the cloud – our updated Delphic oracle-are algorithms turning information into rankings, recommendations, and decisions. On the TED stage, speakers in the likeness of Ray Kurzweil proclaim that with the arrival of superintelligence, we will become an interstellar civilization. And David Bowie asks:

Is there life on Mars?

Within an invisible field of computation, we glide across the surface of surfaces. Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.

Layer by layer, pigment and brushstroke give structure to imagination – becoming pathways, becoming a kind of irreducible necessity, flickering with a faint light.
Painting, perhaps, is among the most human of these.