Ke Zhang’s Gaze: Reframing the Female Self at Flohaus Gallery

On a humid Monday evening in Chelsea, the Flohaus Gallery felt transformed—not just by the colored lights spilling across its walls, but by the palpable presence of artist Ke Zhang, known as KeKeZ, and her audience’s shared curiosity. Zhang’s current show, which opened to a steady stream of post-work visitors this week, blurs the line between subject and author, forcing viewers to reconsider who controls the narrative when a woman stands before the camera.

Zhang’s work refuses the tidy boxes of documentary or performance. In her video piece ‘Repeat After Her,’ looping on a corner screen, women echo lines—sometimes scripted, sometimes spontaneous—while staring directly into the lens. It’s less about catching a ‘truthful moment’ and more about unspooling the artificiality that comes with being watched, recorded, or asked to perform oneself. As a result, the gallery feels more like a stage than a showroom, the audience implicated in the act of looking.

The installation’s centerpiece transforms part of the gallery into a makeshift massage room, suffused in magenta light. Here, visitors are invited to recline, their shifting bodies mirrored by projected images of women negotiating comfort and vulnerability. The scene, at once intimate and public, echoes the city’s overlapping spaces: a therapist’s studio, a Chinatown parlor, a late-night Q train.

Zhang, who moved to New York from Beijing nearly a decade ago, has always been fascinated by the friction between social roles and self-presentation. In a city where surveillance is constant—on subway platforms, in bodega mirrors, even on TikTok—her work lands with fresh urgency. During a brief Q&A, she noted, ‘I want to see how we perform for others, and what happens when we perform for ourselves.’

With the dog days of August pressing in, Flohaus has become a haven from the city’s heat and a place to consider how the female image is made, remade, and—crucially—claimed by its subject. The show runs through the end of the month, offering a rare chance to see one of New York’s most incisive young artists at the top of her game.