Each of Wanxin Zhang’s ceramic sculptures give the viewer something old and something new, reminding us of Jasper Johns’ famous injunction “take a thing, do something to it, do something else to it.” But here, the thing in question is the ancient tradition of Asian ceramic sculpture, and the doing something lies in his treatment of those traditions with additional elaborations derived from other sources, most obviously the long legacy of Northern California ceramic sculpture reaching back to the 1960s.  At first glance, their forms seem familiar, but we soon discover subtle mischief, oftentimes located in several distinct layers of visibility. Read Mark Van Proyen’s full article on Square Cylinder.