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.

In Emptiness there is no Form 2024
film, installation
ongoing

In the past years, I have been making work about extraction and Alchemy. It started off as a subject but has gradually evolved into a strategy.  The underground for me is not only a place of the unseen and the subliminal, but also an exciting realm where things are surging and vibrating.
This work documents the movements in an active iron-ore mine. It studies the energy, force and gravity generated from the movement of labor, the movement of the machines, the movement of the camera, and my involuntary body that trembles together with the earth. Image-making, in this way, turns into a process of alchemy for me.