Zj Pan explores digital trauma through surreal sculpture at Facility Chicago
Chicago-based artist Zj Pan presents Jeez, I Can’t Find My Knees, a solo exhibition opening in July 2025 at Facility, Chicago. This immersive show combines sculpture, installation, performance, and electronic media to create a surreal, emotionally charged playground. Blending digital techniques with childlike spontaneity, Pan crafts a space where trauma, memory, and humor collide.
The exhibition serves as a personal and cultural archive, translating the artist’s fantastical wishes and uncanny encounters into tangible objects. Each work investigates the strangeness of everyday life shaped by social media, news, and the pressures of modern existence. By recontextualizing familiar objects with absurdity and unease, Pan invites audiences to confront the hidden disruptions of daily experience.
At the center of this vision is Ox-Head, a vending machine sculpture that dispenses edible Apple AirPods Pro and miniature missiles. For fifty cents, viewers can consume these symbols of consumerism and conflict. The title refers to a mythological figure from Chinese lore, merging ancient guardianship with the absurd threats of contemporary life.
In Volcano #1, Zj Pan transforms discarded radios into theremins that produce ghostly, modulated tones. This kinetic sculpture reanimates obsolete media, evoking a sense of technological haunting. The eerie sounds generated by this piece challenge our perceptions of presence, absence, and the emotional weight of noise in a hyperconnected world.
Another standout piece, Gotta Catch ‘Em All!, reimagines the artist’s middle school as a phallic sculpture mounted on a rotating platform. Surrounded by flashing searchlights, the piece blurs nostalgia with discomfort, creating an unsettling intersection of personal memory, surveillance, and institutional authority.
Throughout the exhibition, Zj Pan applies a distinctly DIY sensibility. Objects are digitally engineered but treated with the rawness of childish imagination. This blend of sophistication and naivety allows for a compelling critique of consumer culture, digital overload, and emotional numbness. Each sculpture offers an uncomfortable giggle that mutates into deeper reflection.
Zj Pan, born in China in 1998, now lives and works in Chicago. With a B.S. in Physics and Textile and Fashion Design from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pan brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective. His practice spans sculpture, performance, and new media, focusing on the psychological impact of modern life.
By transforming trauma into absurdity and the digital into the uncanny, Jeez, I Can’t Find My Knees redefines what contemporary art can do. It creates a space where discomfort becomes dialogue, and absurdity becomes a tool for healing and understanding.
All images courtesy of Zj Pan, shared with permission
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