PUBLIC INTIMACY

A few years ago, the New York-based artist Zhiliang Zhao realized that, every time he buzzed someone in, his apartment building took their picture. “As a gay guy, that was something immediately interesting to me,” he says. “Oh: I have a record of everyone I hooked up with in my apartment.” This, he says, was a first glimpse into how a public space can determine the contours of private encounters. He began thinking about Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex, in which Kelley made a maquette of the schools he attended; he began studying the benches of Scott Burton, which queered the form and function of business plaza furniture. And, meanwhile, he cruised the backrooms and labyrinths of New York’s networks of sex parties, some in theater basements and others in sorts of recreational centers whose rules didn’t necessarily forbid the kind of recreation guys sought in the saunas.

While earning an MFA at Hunter College, a practice developed. “I started drawing the floor plans of all my apartments,” he says, “just trying to see if I could remember them. All those places I associated intimacy with. I could have referred to photos on my phone, but that wasn’t that interesting to me. I wanted to rely entirely on memories.” For his thesis project, he proposed making a bench as a dedication to a painter whose work he liked. “And then these two ideas sort of merged.” His floor plans became benches; his intimate memories became furniture to share.

Zhao’s first solo show opened in the adventurous Lower East Side gallery Ramiken this summer. Benches, or Find a Friend at the Y comprises a group of seating made of MDF and steel within bulges of Rockite cement. Each work swells a floorplan of some erotic playground into a place a user could cruise, or even fuck on; they are sex benches in all senses. Each is pigmented a different color. “I based them on the color I associate each space with, loosely,” he says. “Maybe the tile wall, or maybe there was something in the air that smells like the space is yellow.” One is a milky, intriguing blue. On its side, Zhao projects a super-8 film documenting two male bodies frotting, right where the stairs lead to the theater building’s basement. It’s the color of blue movies, the blue balls of frotting’s focus on contact over cumming. It’s the color of sadness, the last one Jarman saw. This is the architecture of sex and community, and also of longing, of loneliness, of failure and hope.

“When you’re cruising, you find your favorite spots, your crevices and corners where you rest your body,” he says. “There’s a transmutation from the actual space to the thing you’re sitting on.” Like a stranger coming into your life, filling a need and then a place in your history. In the gallery, a film keeps too much light from coming in the vast storefront, creating a kind of murk Zhao partners with spotlights covered in laser-cut tracings of foliage. The effect of bringing the outdoors in, or perhaps the indoors out, emphasizes the bench identity of the forms. Visitors ramble around them. “I’m drawn to benches, because when one is left to itself, it’s yearning to be occupied. You want to go up and sit on it,” he says, and it wants you to do that, too. “There’s always a sense of waiting for some sort of union.” His work reminds us that, when we cruise, what’s built up around us might just cruise us back.