Zhankun Dai, Crashing Exercises at Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai

Crashing Exercises by Zhankun Dai, at Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, 29 May – 26 July 2025.

You don’t walk into Crashing Exercises, you breach it. A fractured fuselage leans like a wounded threshold at the gallery’s entrance, and already the air feels charged with a hush that is anything but peaceful. There’s a scent of scorched alloy, the spectral trace of combustion long past. What happens, you begin to wonder, when war stops being an event and becomes a texture, woven into the fabric of daily life, disguised in ergonomics and efficiency? In his first solo exhibition at Vanguard Gallery, Zhankun Dai doesn’t stage an argument; he stages an aftermath. A dismantling. The show lingers, not in grand statements, but in the metallic dust of systems we’ve stopped questioning.

Fifteen installations are scattered across the space like crash debris meticulously rearranged into a ruin—not of history, but of habit. The gallery is dim, lit by a cold luminescence that accentuates the sheen of salvaged aerospace parts, as if the floor itself had once been a sky. The visitor moves not through rooms but through scenarios: sterile, suspended, eerily polite. Here, a jet engine wedged into a domestic shelving unit. There, a military-grade harness looping gently over a floral chair. Each station confronts us with a perverse normality, war machines now casual residents in the architecture of comfort.

Dai’s material vocabulary is unflinching: real components from military and civil aviation are not just showcased but reassembled with deliberate discomfort. Steel ribs grafted onto plastic limbs, control panels spliced into kitchen countertops. These aren’t sculptures in the traditional sense; they’re autopsies. In Safety Instructions, you are safe (2024), a fighter jet’s fuel tank is awkwardly conjoined with an inflight entertainment screen, looping banal safety briefings, mocking the illusion of control. Breathing Principles (2024) replaces an ammunition belt with whipped cream chargers, a surrealist punchline that stings with its accuracy. Violence, Dai implies, no longer needs to announce itself; it’s embedded in the consumer-friendly interface.

The works operate as surgical transplants, with the gallery becoming a hybrid body, part war archive, part domestic showroom. Dai’s use of 3D printing and found objects introduces an uncanny softness to the otherwise brutal raw matter. Nothing here is arbitrary: each connection is a decision, each rupture a critique. This is not about “upcycling” or technological nostalgia. It’s about the seepage of militarized logic into spaces we consider safe, normal, even benign. The show pulses with a Heideggerian tension: when military and civilian tools share the same skies, has everyday life become a silent theatre of rehearsal?

And still, the tone is not accusatory. It’s diagnostic, poetic, unnerving. Dai doesn’t scream; he tunes your attention. He re-sensitizes the viewer to the banal creep of weaponized design into the corners of the domestic, the commercial, the intimate. His background in statistics and fine art reveals itself in the precision of his spatial reasoning, the quiet absurdity that underpins each gesture. You laugh, and then you flinch.

As I left, one image lingered with an almost physical weight: a turbine, half-disassembled, nestled on a rug like an obedient pet. In its stillness, it whispered of compliance, of how deeply we’ve internalized the rhythms of surveillance and preparedness. “Crashing Exercises” is not about wreckage. It’s about the illusion that we’re still airborne.

Go see it, not to witness catastrophe, but to recognize its choreography. Not to fear the fall, but to understand the elegance of its delay.