Curated by Larry Lee

The Chinese American Museum of Chicago’s (CAMOC) Spotlight Series presents Metamorphosis, a new exhibition by Chicago-based artist Kun Zhao, curated by Larry Lee, on view on the museum’s fourth floor. Working with discarded commercial materials — barcode labels, product tags, and packaging — Zhao reconfigures the barcode, one of the defining visual systems of contemporary consumer culture, into a set of symbols stripped of their original function. The exhibition runs August 23 through October 4, 2026, with an opening reception on Sunday, August 23, from 2 – 5 p.m. CT. Admission to the exhibition is included with a suggested museum donation.

Across a series titled Barcode Glyph, Zhao reassembles barcode fragments into the shapes of punctuation marks and symbols — an exclamation point, a question mark, a comma, a colon, the infinity symbol, the dollar sign, and the Chinese yuan sign among them. Rendered through digital print, hand-drawn mark-making, and collaged fruit and product labels, the seventeen works range from 24-by-17-inch prints to large-scale pieces reaching 64 by 48 inches. Removed from their original context, the barcodes lose their function as scannable data and take on the appearance of language — familiar in form, illegible in meaning.

The barcode, Zhao notes, marks a turning point in how goods are identified, distributed, and consumed — a sharp departure from the consumer culture of half a century ago in both China and the United States, when objects were more often repaired, reused, and passed down, accumulating memory through use. Metamorphosis considers what is gained and lost in that shift: as the barcode reduces objects to data, Zhao’s work reclaims the same visual system for something closer to language, disrupting its readability through repetition, collage, and changes in orientation. The exhibition’s Chinese title, 蜕 变 , points to that transformation — from function to form, from code to symbol.

Meet the Artist

Selected Work