Jun Rui Lo and Hang Zhang, Swirling Swirling, (2025), Argon gas filled tube. Credit: Sam Hutchinson.
We review the opening afternoon of Swirling, Swirling, an exhibtion at Threshold Sculpture in Burley, which took place on the 22 nd of March 2025. This exhibition will continue until the 20th April 2025.
It is a Saturday afternoon in Burley, and Threshold – the outdoor gallery space founded and curated by Dr. Julia McKinlay – has reopened. Threshold presents artists with an opportunity to take risks by showing public artworks in the front yard (often humorously dubbed ‘Yardens’ by their occupants) of an inner-city-back-to-back terraced house. Until the 20 th of April, Swirling, Swirling by Jun Rui Lo and Hang Zhang’s is available to view without appointment. Jun Rui Lo recently exhibited a new series of mixed-media installation in Moments That May Follow, a duo-show at Serf, with the painter Zoe Maxwell. Hang Zhang recently enlisted her friends and contemporaries for ‘Leeds Artists Dollhouse Show,’ (a play on Leeds Artists Show 2023), as part of her recent solo show Hangover Square at the Florence Trust in London. In working collaboratively, Zhang and Lo prove themselves as artists whose generosity can be seen in their work. In a climate that feels increasingly individual and competitive, this turn to an artistic community feels revolutionary and needed.
Install view of Threshold Sculpture. Credit: Sam Hutchinson.
To provide context for their show, the artists quote the lyrics of an early 2000s Cantopop song (漩渦 syun4 wo1): ‘Come, embrace me, whirl us into a storm, where kisses stir waves a thousand feet high.’ Swirling, Swirling is an exhibition about love – vast, ocean-like and tumultuous. Today, on this abysmally rainy day in LS4, the umbrellas held by the audience extend this nautical atmosphere. Their sail-like texture shields the work within a temporary roof. We are reminded that love is not something that only exists in romance, but can be found in a multitude of people and places.
The works displayed are predominantly fabricated in metal with steel bars visibly welded. The visual language is line-based and drawn, almost written. Directing sections of metal provide a bearing to follow – but there is something considerate in the way the works gesture, both to each other, and for themselves. For example, Zhang’s ‘Shripwreck (Landmark)’ punctuates the irregular paving stones of the floor but without visible damage or harm, as if the brick would self-heal were it to be removed.
Hang Zhang, Shipwreck (Landmark), 2025 Reinforcing steel bar, cable ties, pebbles. Credit: Sam Hutchinson.
Zhang’s works are placed around and in between a stretch of Polyhemp rope, that suspends itself in circular twists and turns. The self-levitating cord reflects the lyricism of the show, guiding us to each of Zhang’s floor-based Shipwreck(s), eventually tethering itself to Lo’s Untitled (I Have Not Forgotten). Zhang’s sculptures have an age and a sense of history that exceeds their recent fabrication. Sections of rebar rust, while smooth rectangles of grey sheet-metal shine in layered criss-crossing formations. There is something morphing and vibrating within Zhang’s sculptures, mirroring a boat – a solid object, that coexists and is moved by the sea. A strange textural contrast, of dark metal and bright white fibre is held in space in Shipwreck: individual sculptures defy the pull of the rope, but are still reliant on it for grounding.
Hang Zhang, front: Shipwreck (Grief I), 2025, Reinforcing steel bar, polyhemp rope. Back: Shipwreck (Grief II), 2025, reinforcing steel bar, polyhemp rope. Credit: Sam Hutchinson.
Zhang’s work gives us a line to follow. Just as the back-to-backs in Leeds become more familiar, and each street’s intricacies, reveal themselves; Zhang’s sculptural, ‘Landmarks’ punctuate an imagined map. We could see this route as evidencing the increased familiarity that friendship, and hence love offer us: something once unfamiliar and indescribable becoming clear with each passing day and action.
On this rainy day, Lo’s ‘Untitled (When it Shines)’ matte black surface appears to bubble. Etched upon with grey shining swirls, the piece is a large twisting plane, dancing around a solid square post. The piece sits upon an X, it’s presence is asserted as the destination, the end. In their quiet way, the drawn etching is more insistent than the thicker welded marks on the reverse of the bent metal. Perhaps because each arc elicits a decisive, cut, permanence. They are deliberately gentle, but like Zhang’s ‘Landmarks’, this insistent precision is surgical in gesture, it is something done with intense care.
Jun Rui Lo, Untitled (When it Shines), 2025, Sheet steel and box sections, spray paint. Credit: Sam Hutchinson.
To the left, above head height in the window of the terraced property is a small piece called ‘Swirling, Swirling’. Drawn by Lo and created in neon by Zhang, the titular work, in pale blue light, speaks to lighthouses and offers us refuge, a welcome. Zhang’s previous neon works have been humorous, but the spiral of ‘Swirling, Swirling’ is confident and sincere in its expression of love and friendship. Zhang’s work often utilises humour, but these works maintain a sense of clarity that is both exciting and brave to witness. Perhaps in working with Lo, whose work is more solemn, a space for deconstructive thinking is provided for Zhang? Zhang’s first name, Hang, means sailing in Chinese, and although we could say all artwork is inherently autobiographical, these most recent works at Threshold feel her most revealing and vulnerable yet.
On the steps leading up to the house is another collaborative work entitled ‘Tea for Tea’, comprised of two metal cups, which Zhang informs me are “Flat White size.” In the inclement weather they are overflowing with rainwater – I cannot help but see this as mirroring the friendship that has created and sustained this exhibition. Viewed with the bottles and cans of a private view, the work becomes about a shared moment, something that is offered by a host, that you feel comfortable enough to accept.
Jun Rui Lo and Hang Zhang,Tea for Tea, 2025, Steel, Tea. Credit: Sam Hutchinson.
The friendship shared between these two artists is as visible as their drawn lines. It is embedded in the surface of the materials, rather than resting upon the surface like the rain. Walking home, to my own back-to-back terrace, I am embraced with the sense that I am traversing the furrows and lines of Swirling, Swirling, the indents of the paving slabs, the paths created by the instructional neon. Swirling, Swirling communicates how artists sustain their practices, with friends and conversation as well as self-directed lone working. It is clear both artists have found a longevity both with each other, and in their own works.
Read George’s review of Moments May Follow, an exhibition which showed at Serf Leeds this March and featured Lo’s work, here.
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