Reaching Beyond: Photography, the Limits of Vision, and New Exorcist

Delivered at the opening of Beichen Zhang: New Exorcist at Asymmetry, April 25 to May 21, 2026

This keynote lecture traces humanity's desire to use the camera to see beyond the limits of human vision— from Muybridge's Animal Locomotion to spirit photographs to X-rays and aura photography— arguing that the lens has always reached for what exceeds ordinary sight, but cannot fully capture it. Drawing on the figure of Pazuzu, the ancient Mesopotamian demon central to Zhang's work, this presentation explores how objects and forces that once served as conduits to the unknown are progressively stripped of meaning through institutional processes like museum display, Hollywood cinema, and popular culture. Zhang's exhibition resists this logic. Zhang's two video channels expose the machinery of containment while allowing Pazuzu to exist as something uncontainable: an atmospheric force, like wind, that leaves only traces behind and refuses to be fixed by any lens.