DEPARTMENT OF ARTISTIC AFFAIRS — ISSUE 001: EXCESS We are pleased to share Department of Artistic Affairs, Elephant Vision Lab’s first art magazine. Featuring works from our Excess open call, an interview with photographer Gigi Zhang, current projects, and future opportunities.
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Elephant Vision Lab
In Excess
GROUP SHOW: IN EXCESS: 13TH - 17TH JUNE
Affairs reflects on our recent open call concerning the subject of Excess, not simply as abundance, but as structure, behaviour, atmosphere, and method.
We live in a world where excess has become a familiar condition. As humans, we possess a remarkable talent for collecting, compiling, producing, accumulating, storing, cataloguing, and occasionally forgetting why we began in the first place. Whether driven by pleasure, desire, financial gain, curiosity, or political ambition, our instinct is often towards more.
The contemporary condition appears increasingly defined not by absence, but by accumulation. Images multiply. Information expands. Objects gather quietly in cupboards and storage units. Notifications arrive with admirable consistency. Across various platforms, a great deal of effort is expended in the pursuit of visibility.
The works presented in this edition consider excess through repetition, labour, density, obsession, devotion, productivity, and prolonged acts of making.
OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE
Issue no.
They reflect on historical moments of abundance as well as the smaller, everyday forms of excess that shape contemporary life.
Among the subjects explored is the history of nuclear cloud sampling, where aircraft were routinely flown through radioactive mushroom clouds to collect data following atomic weapons tests. An extraordinary undertaking born from an extraordinary period, it serves as a reminder that excess is not always measured in quantity alone, but also in ambition, repetition, risk, and the persistent desire to know more than is strictly necessary.
Alongside the exhibition feature, this issue includes artist interviews, current projects from Elephant Vision Lab, and notices regarding future open calls and departmental activities.
Given the considerable number of art magazines already in circulation, there appeared to be very little need for another one.
Into the Atom the first permanent exhibition dedicated to RAF Nuclear cloud sampling opened at the Wings Aviation Museum on the 1st May. Elephant Vision Lab were responsible for the concept, design, interpretation and build of the exhibition, working on the project since December 2025 the project had a quick turn around from initial concept to build and launch. Into the Atom is the first museum exhibition project from Elephant Vision Lab.
The exhibition featuring the cockpit of a Canberra B6 and original artefacts focuses on the stories of servicemen, pilots and crew who played a role in the UK's nuclear cloud
NATOR sampling operations on the Christmas islands during 1954-1958 during the cold war.
Pilots were instructed to fly through atomic mushroom clouds minutes after detonation to collect radiation samples which could be analysed by the atomic weapons agency.
With those onboard the Canberra B6's describing how when the explosions happened the light was so bright they could see their bones through their skin, just like an X-ray, another crew member described the blast saying it was like 'looking. into the face of god'
Into the Atom
Brain's hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific relied on the roundinated affort of thousands of servic personnel and civilian specialists
Dung the 1950s end goed and the card Forificing Ops Te (1953) M (1956 and Open Gale 1957-58) Dan Arkon and land local Royal Afee seming
Algo 76 SQUADRON
Operation Grapple Y: Thermonuclear Testing and Airborne Sampling
Military
Support Operations
The exhibition also features art work form Zhenghan Huang who created video montages of documentation and artefacts which play across three central screens in the space. And also a 3D data sculpture of mushroom cloud created by Lilis lab showing a visualisation of three of the different nuclear tests.
The exhibition is on permanent display at the Wings Aviation Museum:
Unit 1, Bucklands Farm, Brantridge Lane, Near Balcombe, West Sussex, RH17 6JT www.wingsmuseum.co.uk
Concept, content of the exhibition: Wings Museum Pasquini family
Concept, design, curation, realisation and fabrication of the exhibition:
Elephant Vision Lab: Alexander Collinson Xin Yue Ma
Gallery Technicians: Felix Reitze de la Haye Wendi Wu Jiayin Lu
Mushroom Cloud (Data Sculpture)
This object visualises three early nuclear test detonations by translating their recorded cloud heights into physical form. Each contour in the mushroom cloud corresponds to a specific test:
Layer corresponds to a specific detonation:
Kite: <3 kilotons | 25,000-30,000 fr Totem 1:9-10 kilotons | 35,000-40,000 ft Mosaic G2: 60 kilotons | 45,000-50,000 ft
The vertical scale reflects the recorded altitude range of each cloud, while their relative positions suggest the relationship between explosive power and atmospheric reach.
VIDEO SILLS FROM ZHENGHAN HUANG
VIDEO SILLS FROM ZHENGHAN HUANG
Nuclear
Cloud Plyers before being repulsed back down to 46,000ft.
SECRET
Group Show: In Excess (13th-17th May)
Location: Studio 1 LOCKSIDE STUDIOS, BREAM STREET, E3 2NT
In Excess saw 10 artists exhibit their work at Studio 1, Lockside studios, London with a range of works and media from traditional crafts such as handmade mask making and embroidered quilts to painting and digital works. Together the works all explored the theme of Excess.
In Excess explores repetition, accumulation, and abundance through works shaped by sustained labor, serial processes, and obsessive gestures.
Across painting, sculpture, photography, video, print, and text-based practices, the exhibition considers excess as both method and condition.
Dense compositions, repeated forms, and amassed materials reflect the rhythms of consumption, habit, desire, and productivity embedded in everyday life. The works oscillate between order and chaos, devotion and exhaustion, asking what emerges through continual return and prolonged acts of making.
Collectively, In Excess examines how repetition can become a way of measuring time, testing. limits, and persisting beyond necessity.
Amberstiche is a moving image work that brings together filmed performance and digital environments, creating a slow, atmospheric space where movement fades into stillness and presence lingers in transition. Through repeated gestures and layered imagery, the work connects to ideas of excess as something that builds over time. The accumulation of bodies, movements, and digital traces creates a sense of saturation, where nothing fully disappears or resolves. Instead, the figures remain held in a state that feels both still and ongoing. The idea of excess is also reflected
Amberstiche thematically, as this piece ultimately points to the fragility of our ecosystem, shaped by the accumulation of human actions and overproduction. What begins as repetition and layering gradually builds into a sense of imbalance, where excess no longer sustains but overwhelms, leaving the figures suspended in a state that feels both preserved and endangered. In the end, all fossilized animals turn into a tree that seems both sacred and grotesque, a final form where life, decay, and accumulation merge into something at once reverent and unsettling.
This work reconstructs the outer shell of an antique wooden chair. The original chair was tightly wrapped in acrylic; once hardened, the acrylic skin was removed and reassembled. What remains is a transparent structure-like the shed skin of a snake retaining the form but emptied of its substance. The chair, one of the most intimate objects in relation to the body, normally supports weight and defines posture within space. Here, however, it refuses function. The absence of the seated body becomes more present than the object itself. The act of wrapping
Domestic Carcass and peeling is both preservation and erasure. While the surface is revealed, the original material disappears. This paradox recalls the uncanny: the form is familiar, yet its hollow interior produces subtle unease. Drawing on the idea that the essence of a vessel lies in the void it contains, the work shifts attention from material mass to empty space. The chair becomes not an object, but a trace—a spatial imprint of a body no longer there. In this emptiness lies potential. The viewer is invited to project presence into absence, completing the work through imagination.
Damaged wires (2026) brings together a pile of household wires that have been replaced due to damage but retained because they continue to function intermittently. No longer relied upon, these objects occupy a secondary status, kept in reserve rather than discarded. The work emerges from this condition of partial utility, where objects exist between use and obsolescence. Through accumulation, it reflects a tendency to JACK SANDERS
hold onto items that exceed immediate need, shaped by habits of contingency, hesitation, and ongoing use. The cables become a coiled mound, unveiling a myriad of coloured overlapping lines, from almost new to visibly strained. In this way, the work reflects how objects are kept and gathered over time, extending their presence beyond immediate need through everyday habits.
WEBRO MF 100
A geometric painting representing the raising heat of a fever. Pyrexia - Acrylic on canvas 16 x 12 inches
Playhouse - Oil on Canvas
I left the house when I was nineteen. Not in rebellion, not in triumph, just quietly, like a shadow slipping out before the sun could catch it. That boy, the one who left, he died five years later. Not all at once, not with drama, just slowly, in the corners of strange rooms, under unfamiliar ceilings, in the silence between becoming and forgetting. What remains are fragments, fragments
Playhouse of time, scattered like broken glass, each holding the reflection of a window. Windows that once watched me with quiet patience. Windows before which I lived, breathed, and unknowingly rehearsed my many endings. Each window remembers a different version of me, the laughter too loud, the tears too quiet, the restless pacing, the mornings that arrived like questions, the nights that refused to end. And now, I gather these pieces not to rebuild, but to remember the boy, before the world taught him to disappear.
HAREH
DELL
Artificial Oceans presents two seascapes as an experiment. One of these animations. depicts the Aegean sea, while the other depicts its counterfeit (an ai simulation of an ocean). The two scenes are mediated through the Risograph printing method, giving them a shared lo-fi aesthetic. This lo-fi filter blurs the inherent differences between filmed reality and generative fictions. And in this way, these companion
MAX L ADAMS
DELL seascapes attempt to distill their deeper dissonance. The generative ocean is all ebb and no flow. It's waves can only increase. Yet in a deeper sense, it has no threshold, no boundaries. This is true in its shape, but also in its application, as Al image generators produce a glut of generative slop, harvested from hordes of scraped data-pure excess.
Improvisational patchwork quilt composed with from hand sublimation prints from defamiliarised consumer detritus, dendritic packaging materials, baby tomato stems, fast
Urge Surfing fashion sequins. Fabrics are salvaged from luxury upholstery desdstock/ surplus. Sublimation printed Velvets, ombre chenille, satin, thread, wadding - 75cm X 110cm.
This digital photographic work shows the self as layered, repeated, and shifting. Using accumulation, it explores how identity is shaped through excess. The images suggest that focusing too much.
XUEQING LIANG
on the self can become overwhelming or self-indulgent, where attention both reveals and wears down. Repetition turns inward, showing desire, fragmentation, and the strain of constant self-focus.
Echoes and Reflections - print on paper and projection - 210 x 297 millimetres x 2 + two projectors.
In my research on the self representational work of female photographers, I was intrigued by their use of mirrors. I wanted to explore to what extent a mirror can
Echoes and Reflections represent the "self" in front of it, incorporating the intricate relationship women have with mirrors. I created two similar videos side by side to evoke the sense of a mirror, yet they are not exactly the same-one imitates the other, and over time, they gradually become entirely different.
Masking Mixed media handcrafted masks using plaster, fabric, faux fur, vegetable-tanned leather, feathers, flowers, pearls, beads and paint - 40 x 60 cm
Masks: Surface in Excess consists of three enlarged handcrafted masks exploring the repeated construction of a performed self. The work responds to narcissistic dynamics through the idea of masking: the continuous need
Masking to protect, idealise and control one's outward image. Each mask suggests a different stage of this process — concealment, reinforcement and distortion.
Rather than presenting excess through quantity alone, the work treats excess as repetition: the repeated making of surfaces, the accumulation of protective layers, and the gradual loss of an authentic self beneath them.
HIT & RUN is a one-day exhibition built around movement, momentum, and temporary takeover. Across three consecutive days, the space will completely transform each day. Artists arrive in the morning, install work in the space, exhibit throughout the day, meet audiences and other artists during an evening viewing, then deinstall the same night.
HIT & RUN leans into the energy of the temporary pop up culture: A show that appears quickly, takes over, and disappears again. An encounter that only exists if you were there for it. Participating artists will be programmed into one of the two days based on shared themes, visual conversations, and connections between submitted works.
Triangle Popup 66 Church Street, London, NW8 8ET
10-min walk from Edgware Road and Marylebone Station.
Gigi Zhang is a London-based artist from China whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, video, and contemporary art.
After studying philosophy and music at Bard College in New York, she moved to London to pursue a master's degree in photography at the University of the Arts London. Her work explores the formation of self, examining the space between socially defined identities and personal perception in an ever-changing world.
RECORDED CONVERSATIONS
Gigi Zhang
Drawing on philosophy, contemporary art, and fashion, Zhang's practice moves fluidly across mediums.
Her work lends itself naturally to the themes of In Excess, reflecting on identity, perception, and the shifting boundaries of the self. We recently caught up with Gigi following her participation exhibiting in our open call last month In Excess, to discuss her evolving practice and influences.
RIZM
You studied philosophy and music before pursuing photography. How do these disciplines continue to shape your artistic practice today?
The more I do photography, the more I realise that philosophy is an essential way of thinking and looking at things embedded in me. When I first started photography after graduating from a philosophy undergrad study, I was trying to solve the philosophical questions I had in mind through a photographic approach. I gradually realised that the visual provides things that cannot be explicated by text. After I finished my graduate show in photography, I decided not to set a question that guided me through the work, but rather to follow my intuition and take pictures. However, my philosophical way of thinking can never get out of my head. If an image can be articulated by text, then the image loses its meaning. At this stage, I've been trying to put together images and text in a way that neither exploits the other.
Your practice draws from contemporary art, philosophy, and fashion. What attracts you to working across these different fields?
I have been interested in visual culture and fashion since a very young age. However, after getting my first job in fashion, I realised that my passion lay not in working within the industry, but in learning about the art, history, and ideas behind fashion. On the other hand, contemporary art provides countless gateways for us to explore and understand the world, nature, ourselves, and the relationship between these things. After getting into photography, I realised that 'fashion + photography' isn't the same as fashion photography. For me, the compelling aspect of fashion and photography is the philosophy behind them.
Having lived in China, New York, and London, how have different cultural environments influenced your understanding of the self?
When I first returned home to Kunming after years in New York, I realised that I didn't belong there as fully as I had expected. No matter how strong the nostalgia had been, the way I think and feel had already been shaped by the places I had lived. I found myself constantly searching for a new sense of belonging-something that wasn't completely Kunming or New York.
When I later moved to London, I encountered the same feeling again. I came to realise that no geographical region could provide me with a complete sense of belonging. The boundary between the inner self and the outside world is like the marks left by waves on a beach. The waves strike with force, but what remains is an accumulating imprint on the wet sand. In the end, I am made up of all my past experiences and all the places I have lived. A lot of people may have lived in the same cities, but it's the way the old self makes sense of things through the experiences it undergoes that shapes the future self
Your project Echoes and Reflections begins with the familiar experience of recognising oneself in a mirror. Why did the mirror become such a compelling starting point for this investigation?
I've been having trouble identifying myself with "my image" in the mirror for a long time. I was reading Lacan one day and his "mirror stage" theory struck me. I realised the reason I have trouble identifying with it is because the image that I present to other people (i.e., the image in the mirror) doesn't align with the image I have of myself in my mind. However, I cannot escape from my body—an entity that is usually associated with the idea of 'me.'
The complex relationship between the self and the mirror has thus become a journey of exploration.
In a world increasingly mediated by images and screens, do you think our relationship with ourselves has fundamentally changed?
Yes. Fragmented information takes away our chance to meditate upon things. Each time we look at something carefully and think about it, or our relationship with it, a new connection between the self and the world is built. This lack of informational context makes it more difficult to build a profound connection with the world around us.
What challenges arise when translating abstract philosophical ideas into visual forms?
The process isn't linear. It's not like typing a series of words into Al image generator and then have the image. It's more about following the intuition and keep working on it let intuition manifest itself.
Is there a medium or form you are eager to experiment with in the future?
Yes! In my last show, I experimented with plaster, coffee grounds, gesso, clay, and various alternative photographic processes. I was really intrigued by how materiality and form work with images. I want to create more images with tangible shapes in the future. What would you like readers to understand about your work that may not be immediately visible in the images themselves?
Seeing the images moving within the installation versus seeing them flat on a screen really makes a big difference. Two-dimensional media cannot convey the full experience of the complete work.
Lastly, looking ahead, what can we expect to see from you in the coming months?
I will have another show with my collective, dg03, at Copeland Gallery this August! It will be the biggest space we have worked in. We will explore the notion of the human through different perspectives and forms of images.
Artists: Xin Yue Ma & Alexander Collinson Medium: Clay, metal, wood, audio Dimensions: H300cm, x W200cm x D400cm
This installation takes shape through a three- metre linear structure composed of metal tubing, natural branches, and black clay heads, each the size of a leaf, fixed in place with soldered tin. The tin, flowing over and partially encasing the bark, operates both as a connector and a shroud, a point where growth is sealed and time is suspended. The work evokes ancient practices such as knotting cords to record events, with each ceramic head acting as a node on THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Echo of Echo a timeline: a face remembered, altered, and inevitably rewritten through the act of replication.
It originates from repeatedly hand-forming a single face from memory without visual reference. Over time, the "original" dissolves into a chain of imperfect echoes, an echo of an echo, until resemblance becomes estrangement. Surrounding the sculpture, six to eight floor- based speakers form a sonic ring. A sustained tonal core is punctuated by noise fragments and fleeting voices, guiding the viewer into a 360-degree movement. This choreography transforms looking into a ritual, where each act of seeing is also an act of remaking.
ECHO OF ECHO
ECHO OF ECHO
Balancing linear form with material fracture, the piece becomes a meditation on the way memory is both preserved and eroded by the very processes that seek to hold it. It occupies a space between presence and absence, between the organic and the industrial, between nowhere and the moment of encounter, where nothing can be done to stop change, yet everything is shaped by it.
CREDITS ZHENGHAN HUANG
Exhibited at: To The Nameless Fitzrovia Gallery
Issue No. 001 DEPARTMENT OF ARTISTIC AFFAIRS JUNE 2026
Elephant Vision Lab
JUNE 2026