TENET

Rexy Tseng
Tenet

Curated by Sophia Yvette Scherer
Opening: December 12, 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
Exhibition: December 13, 2025 – January 24, 2025
Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin

Tenet marks Rexy Tseng’s first solo presentation at Galerie Met. A series of chance encounters the artist experienced in Berlin forms the conceptual backbone of the exhibition, in which he reflects on situational probability and the potentials that emerge from it for his own artistic practice. Tseng examines this tension between chance and contingency through the lens of gambling – most notably the lottery, a structure that, especially in unstable times, can be read as an attempt to regain lost agency through the mere possibility of monetary gain. (Artistic) careers, too, hinge on a chain of controllable and accidental circumstances, a limbo we continuously try to navigate.

Born in Taipei, having lived in the United States and China before settling in Berlin, Tseng pursues a genuine interest in the fragility of social structures, particularly in moments shaped by the loss of control. In his dense paintings, events culminate: disastrous conditions and global disruptions form an armature for visualizing the forms of greed generated by the relentless growth-fetish embedded in technocapitalist systems. Tseng uses imagery to convey the moment immediately after the turmoil: when fate has been determined, the vibe shift is apparent and the air has become thick.

In this exhibition, however, Tseng marks a point in time before the disaster. This moment holds the chance of reversing one’s own fate—here, through the seemingly irrational power of gambling. The title “Tenet” derives from the Latin tenere (to hold) and denotes a belief or doctrine in both religious and philosophical sense. Its palindromic quality, legible forwards and backwards, mirrors the cyclical logics inherent in the works.

The lottery machine Luscious Opportunity Teases Tears Optimistically (L.O.T.T.O.), 2025, snakes through the gallery space like an intestinal system. The randomly drawn ball might be a lucky number, only to disappear back into the pot after its long passage through the tubing. Following the principle that “all life moves in dynamic cycles,” the kinetic closed-circuit machine operates rhythmically, feeding and digesting itself. This metabolic quality lends the apparatus an organic moment, though without productive output. Operating without human intervention, it creates distance and raises questions about autonomy (of labor/machines), purpose (of life), and the determination (of fate). At the same time, it points toward fundamental conditions: Into which society is one born? Which structural constraints shape one’s position? And to what extent does careerist drive condition one’s point of departure? In Chinese mythology and everyday practice, luck is approached with pragmatic clarity. It is considered a quantifiable and limited resource—one that can be spent, earned, loaned, stolen, or even purchased (e.g., as a temple talisman). While luck is understood as universally accessible, those who have already enjoyed a happy life in their younger years will have to make a little more effort in old age, and vice versa.

The allure of the lottery lies in its radical simplicity. A paper ticket with its gridded numbers and the weekly drawing convey an illusion of control and agency, of consciously influencing one’s own destiny. Rather than confronting loss directly, players console themselves with the “close call-effect,” which legitimizes their renewed participation. A spark of superstition proves useful here, in order to engage in this socially accepted, albeit mildly ridiculed, activity. Only those who play increase their chances of good fortune. Unlike financial speculation or the structural advantage of inheritance, the lottery is democratic, seductive, ow-threshold and accessible without the need for tedious engagement with complex mathematical models.

After periods in which public gambling was banned—often by the Church—the lottery served throughout the 19th century as a primary mechanism for remonetizing state expenditures, effectively enlisting citizens in covering national debts or misguided investments, as well as the soaring costs and losses of war. This pseudo-social function was reframed as a promise of individual fortune. The flourishing gambling industry, however, has always reflected the precariousness of everyday life, or, in Mark Fisher’s view, a “doomed Proletarian romance.” The daydream of upward mobility, fuelled by the fantasy of sudden wealth, is doomed to failure by the system itself: “Capitalism has colonized the dreaming life.”

Still, money gained through gambling is often deemed immoral when compared to “hard-earned” income. In October 1910, the writer Thaddäus Rittner argued in Der Sturm that the lottery’s very immorality granted it a vital social and psychological function. It creates hope for those whose lives are dominated by labor: “The lottery is timely: for it considers my tailor’s debts from yesterday and my empty stomach today,” whereas “[…] the Sunday sermon is nothing but a ceremony.” The critical discourse surrounding the hopeful homo ludens (playing humankind) has always revealed shifting societal deficiency. What Rittner described as the decline of institutionalized belief—the sermon offering no horizon—resurfaces a century later in Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s and Fisher’s notion of the “slow cancellation of the future.” Both diagnose the erosion of belief systems and the diminishing capacity to imagine alternatives beyond either religious or capitalist frameworks. Fisher’s claim that everything now considered realistic was once deemed impossible could be radicalized: Why not imagine the jackpot as a tentative cure for the “bruised optimism” that, as Rexy Tseng argues, shapes the affective climate of our present?

Tseng’s new drawing series RT202512DRAW, 2025, is inspired by technical diagrams found in instruction manuals. Like clockwork, components within a machine are expected to interlock smoothly according to a clear logic. Usually obscured by optical casings, the inner workings of such apparatuses remain invisible. What appears as random mechanism inside slot machines is, in reality, precise engineering. Yet in Tseng’s four graphite drawings, the sooted, hatched contours obscure this precision, shifting the amusement device into a dark, smoky, almost sentient mechanical sculpture reminiscent of H. R. Giger’s phantasmagoric fusions of human and machine. Pulling the lever of a one-armed bandit, engaging it with one’s own bodily force, creates a peculiar trust in the device. In virtual gambling (or, similarly, autonomous driving), the system’s functioning becomes elusive; in this abstraction, artificial effects of light, sound, and motion are required to stimulate belief.

Stimulation and resonance also underpin the video work Applause, 2025, installed at the rear of the gallery. Unceasingly, multicolored confetti rains over a grid of clapping hands. Gestures of recognition are not only fundamental to the attention economy but accompany us throughout life. Affirmation and congratulations operate as psychological candies that sustain social behavior and drive in an era defined by dead-end forecasts of economic or personal ascent. Our understanding of action and reaction, of agency and consequence, is formed through what Hartmut Rosa terms “experiences of resonance.”

Six lottery tickets form the temporal and conceptual frame of the exhibition. At both the opening and the finissage, the gallerist, artist, and curator will collectively participate in a lottery drawing, underscoring not only the contingency of their encounter but also subjecting themselves to the theoretical fields of possibility that condition their own work.

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Sophia Yvette Scherer