Xiao Zhang's Post Contact Gym Turns Gestures into Sculptural Machines

London-based artist Xiao Zhang's series Post Contact Gym transforms exercise equipment into sculptural machines that question intimacy, touch, and embodied connection in the digital age. The works include the Hugger, Hand Shaker, Hand Waver, High Fiver, and Fist Bumper—machines based on familiar forms of human contact that have become uncanny and unsettling. Zhang's gym format treats the body as a project to be disciplined, extending fitness logic to affection and social contact. The Hugger, made of bent aluminum tubing and molded ergonomic forms, turns an embrace into a mechanical process. Zhang references Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and Byung-Chul Han's The Agony of Eros to frame the work. The series was exhibited at Orleans House Gallery, London, UK in May 2025, and at Greatorex Street, London, UK from 7-10 July 2025. Zhang, who grew up online, describes the screen as both a comfort blanket and a limitation. Her movement between Beijing and London deepens the inquiry into absence and failed gestures. Post Contact Gym is not nostalgic but asks whether bodies are losing forms of social knowledge faster than the loss can be named.