Zechen Zhang

This is a TR of lies.

According to the physiological study, people tells 20-200 lies each day. There are 8 different lies in Psychological classification, which defined every lie we tell in daily life. There are many reasons to tell lies, for social manners, for selfish aims or just for protecting someone from unacceptable reality. No one can live without lies.

Triangle: Triangle is the most stable shape. The inevitable acute angles may represent the harm.

Rectangle: Unshakeable shape represent solid truth.

Circle: Circle is the perfect shape in philosophy and mathematics to represent the perfect lie.

2019

The name of this short movie is based on the ancient Chinese Narrative history that is traditionally regarded as a commentary on the ancient Chinese chronicle Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋).

风/马/牛/不/相/及

Wind/horse/ox/not/mutually/related.

To be totally unrelated like wind, horse and ox, to have absolutely nothing in common with each other.

Effective communication based on similar thinking. How can different people communicate is an interesting question I really want to discover.

In The Offering 2021, I have attempted to reinvent a 1778 colonial painting through digital media. I hope to break down the barriers between my individualistic expression and collective reception through a combination of symbolic recreation and new technologies that facilitate communication.

In today's world, we no longer see only through the naked eye but through images produced by cameras, VCRs and even virtual reality technology, which make everyday life a place dominated by microscopic power. That is to say, people tend to experience history through images, and this increasingly symbolic world makes it possible for images to construct a narrative as well. I see this fact as both an opportunity and a challenge for artists.

What would new technologies give us in the 5G decade?

01/2021

In the group of work Make a Concrete Analysis of Concrete Condition, I used the Communist Manifesto, written in Chinese calligraphy, underlying the image. I wanted to focus on the structure of the square ideograms in the picture rather than the content.

Is the content of the text something that can be ignored entirely? I kept asking myself this question during the process of creating the work. In fact, the creation of this group of works was so full of twists due to my doubts about myself that at the end, I painfully covered the third image with black and began to doubt everything I had ever done.

Fortunately, I was able to document the entire creative process through photographic techniques, and the process became a personal construction of my history. Coming to terms with my own failures was difficult but feeling the clash between my personal account and my collective history thrilled me. So, I named my painful third painting Losing the Fruits of Revolution.

02/2021

This is an experiment about Psychoanalysis. I use three scenes to recreate this therapy course. The first scene is to take apart an old hand-made sweater I used to wear, then I rearrange the woollen and knit it into a new one.

The red woollen, Interlaced Flesh and Blood

I accept all that influence and finally remake it into a part of me.

The Japanese writer and artist Kimifusa Abe had a short story named The Red Cocoon about a solitary man who used his whole life to find a home. At the end of the story, he created a red cocoon and lived in it.

Rebuilding influences behind oneself is a lifelong subject. Just like finding a destination, whether you make a nice fit sweater again or a cocoon, it's still a precious memory.

2019

In addition to using the red wool to represent flesh and blood, the mechanical act of knitting creates value as labour in this work too. Frederick Engles claimed that labour created the human being, and I was curious about how my work could recreate me.

Chinese calligraphy is perhaps another form of weaving, but in a spiritual way; the peculiarities of the square font and hieroglyphs allow it to be structurally reconfigured at will, opening up endless possibilities.

Descartes' dualism of mind and body divides body and spirit into two distinct entities, with the soul overriding the physical body. My thinking is more in the direction of the relationship between body and soul that Hegel mentions in his discussion of life: the concept of life is the soul, and the soul has the body as its reality or realisation, and the body is merely the externalisation, particularisation and individuation of the soul, a mere appendage of the soul. So it is the plasticised rice paper and text prescribes the rough physical form, while the flesh at the level of material intention is broken and bloodily clinging.

This installation is a letter to Zhi Zengxia. In a way, it was also a collaborative project between me and her. The main body of this installation is a wall-mounted mailbox that she made in the early years of the 1950s, which is both functional and installed. What I did is reproduce her floral stitch pattern with oil and board, tried to connect with her younger spirit.

She was an ordinary peasant in rural China. Like most poor people in developing countries, my grandmother could barely feed herself in her youth. This mailbox was also put together from scraps of fabric, which means that she could only keep it as shiny as possible on the surface. She wasn't able to read and write, but she still snitched some characters as decoration. This leads to a slight difficulty in the identification of these characters.

She actually achieves a balance between the structure and meaning of square characters without being able to read or write. This technique has inspired me too. It was a pleasure to work with her.

I will always remember her with fondness.

2021

 I liked that dream.

I typed my birthday.

I cried for a little dead chicken. 

I have grown up.

I no longer need to afraid.

I still can fight.

2021

2020

2021