Leah Zhang works with film, photography, sound and installation. With a background in film studies, her work is a research practice around image and media.  Leah’s work usually involves enormous (onsite) labor and extensive collaboration. Her work discusses the ontology and materiality of image, the subjects and perspectives of looking, the metaphysics of visual transformation and its socio-historical implications. In recent years, Leah has been making work about extraction and alchemy both as a subject and as a thought process.

Leah is a resident artist at de Ateliers. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

All My Friends are Offline
10’29’’

All My Friends Are Offline is a video made of screen-captures of Chinese Internet live streamers who leave their cameras on when they go to sleep, usually during 1am to 6am China Standard time. In the video, I labeled each screen according to what the live streamers usually do during the daytime. However, during the nighttime when they go to sleep, what we have is only a black screen on which almost nothing is visible despite the sound coming from the recorded space, usually very intimate space such as the live streamer’s bedroom. These scenes give us a paradoxical sense that the streamers are both there and not there; that these are their most public and private moments. It is also an aspect of the Internet that is romantic and yet sometimes disappointing. I divide the screens into grids to mimic the screen of an old surveillance monitor, or a modern panopticon. Yet, the power relationship here is shifted: those who are looking into others' private world are disappointed by what's in front of their eyes.