Night Gallery Presents Factory Doomscroll in Los Angeles

There is a particular exhaustion built into objects designed to make life easier. The massage chair that hums past midnight.

The meme that spreads while its subject is still being arraigned. Both operate on the same logic: comfort as motion, repetition as relief, with the relief never quite landing.

What happens when those objects outlive their usefulness but continue running anyway, or when the ephemeral is forced to hold its form long past the moment it was designed for?

That gap between function and performance, between the promise of ease and its mechanical actuality, is where this exhibition lives.

Both artists are working with the same broken machine, one in steel and motor, the other in acrylic and brushwork, each asking whether preserving the throwaway changes anything about its essential nature.

Night Gallery's industrial Imperial Street space in Los Angeles carries a particular charge for a show that opened during Frieze L.A., an art fair weekend built on velocity, on the kind of looking that moves fast and commits to nothing.

Factory Doomscroll doesn't resist that context. It amplifies it. The room hums and pulses: motors cycle, canvases hold images that should have been dead by the time the paint dried.

Christine Tien Wang takes internet memes and renders them in large-scale photorealistic acrylic, a process that is, by design, counterproductive. 

AI Luigi Angel (2025) depicts Luigi Mangione winged, haloed, pistols in hand: the internet's brief and ironic canonization of an accused killer as folk hero, frozen in the moment the cultural current was already moving past it.

Wang began the canvas when the meme was aging; by the time it was finished, its relevance had approached zero. The painting carries that decay without staging it as tragedy. It holds the image still and asks what it costs to do so. 

The Loser (2025) and Bernie FAFO (2025) operate on similar logic, viral political imagery elevated into large-format acrylic, granted the material permanence that nothing born on a screen was ever supposed to have.

Rachel Youn's CLEANSE (I'll do it myself) (2024) reimagines a decommissioned car wash: wavy nylon strips hang from a tall steel frame, animated by an AC motor.

The curtains are printed with an escape-fantasy beach scene, clear water, painfully blue sky, and they move through it continuously, performing relaxation for no one. The machine has outlived its commercial usefulness and knows nothing of it. It just keeps going.

No Pain No Gain (2025) compounds this: a walking band fitted with a dead battery sits alongside a found moving waterfall picture frame and an assortment of wellness hardware. The motor runs or it doesn't; the waterfall loops regardless. The work holds the collapsed promise of self-improvement without editorializing about it, the title does what the object refuses to.

Slow Burn (2026) mounts a neck massager with artificial orchid and leaves, glass, snake chain, and monitor wall arm, wellness hardware assembled into something that reads more like an altar than a device. The object's domestic utility is still legible but beside the point; it has been repurposed into a thing that holds its form, that tends to itself.

In the newer Perfect Lovers II (2026), an under-desk elliptical machine is fitted with artificial orchids and bird spikes, wellness infrastructure and deterrent infrastructure, both running, both ornamental, neither of them quite for a person.

The show arrives at a specific moment: an era in which both physical and digital economies of comfort operate through the same logic of manufactured obsolescence. The wellness device is engineered to be replaced. The meme is engineered to decay.

The platform profits from the next iteration, not the current one. Wang and Youn work against that logic, not by opposing it, but by taking it seriously enough to slow it down. Wang's brushwork is the labor the internet refuses to value; Youn's motors are the infrastructure that self-care culture never acknowledges. Neither artist resolves the question of whether preserving the throwaway changes anything about its essential nature, and that ambiguity seems fully intentional.

The machines in this room will still be cycling long after the memes on the walls have become archaeological. The comfort they promise has outlasted its purpose, yet the motion remains, a quiet endurance that asks whether rest, too, has become just another form of labor.

Rachel Youn on Instagram
Christine Tien Wang in Instagram
Night Gallery on Instagram

Installation Views - Night Gallery L.A.

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