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.

The Future Semiotics of A.S.M.R.
A.S.M.R.的未来符号学
7’06’’

In The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Jean Baudrillard argues that in our post-modern media landscape, the relationship between war and its spectator has changed. The same explosions are displayed repeatedly, until the audience get used to them and eventually deconstruct the violence and genuineness. For me, A.S.M.R., which is both sensual (stimulating) and soothing, is a perfect metaphor for the media’s effort to both entertain (stimulate) and heal the audience. This video essay aims at creating a dictionary for the future ASMR experiences we will have through our media: from tingling to trance.

This work is inspired by artist Yuxiang Dong’s work Semiotics of ASMR. However, what is different here is that I do not focus on the present of A.S.M.R.. Instead, I try to imagine the future of A.S.M.R., when the meaning of its symbols doesn't matter anymore, and can be associated with anything.

installation view 2022
Modern Art Museum 艺仓美术馆, Shanghai, China