For her solo exhibition “Spillover” (2026) at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, Ann Zhao assembled a 20-something-page chapbook of sparks of inspiration and life dumps. A photo of her laptop on the couch, a screenshot of filmmaking notes, a snapshot of a few lines from a book—the content reads as if lifted from the artist’s social media or sketchpad, encapsulating the spontaneity that anchors her practice. That diaristic quality structures Ben Ming Nian (2026), 24 photographs from the year Zhao spent in Shanghai. The images fall just short of being autobiographical: opaque in their details and too fragmentary to cohere into narrative. She seems to leave the work unresolved, suspended on the threshold of completion.