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 (onsite) labor and extensive collaboration.   Shaped by her memory of growing up in a mining town in China, Leah’s practice incorporates an inward-looking perspective, just like mining, which digs deeper and deeper into the ground. Inspired by alchemy in mining, Leah’s interest rests in transformation and its ability to shift value and ontology. She is drawn to the unstable passages between forms of being and body, where the cinematic, the poetic, the magical, the chemical, the social, and the personal overlap, rendering moments when representations fail.



Leah currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Absolute Purity
— Silver pieces recovered from the 16mm films of the movie Liu Qiao Er (1956)
— Silver and combined material, 1 x 1.5 inches, 1.7g

Through a series of chemical process, I recovered all the silver that lies in the 16mm films of the revolution movie Liu Qiaoer (1956). The reels of film of this movie was made by collecting silver from Chinese households, a communist method of making the film at the time. However, after many years, as film is now considered an obsolete medium, all the physical and spiritual energy of collectivist film production is encapsulated in this tiny piece of silver. This work discusses the complicated value of silver, the light-sensitive material for film, in a political context.


installation view, 2024
the silver piece under microscope; bleach-washed 16mm film
Photographic Geomancy, Times Museum, Guangzhou, China
photo by Feng Fangyu

Chemical process