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. 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.

BEELD
film, installation
35’11’’

In 1996, the Chinese Buddhist statue Zhanggong was acquired by a Dutch collector. A mummy of a monk, that had died 1000 years ago was discovered inside. After this finding, the statue began its journey of being examined in a hospital, exhibited in museums, and stored at the collector’s repository, further complicating its role as a Buddha, a mummy, an artwork and a commodity. A few years later, in Tampa, Florida, people gathered in front of a finance building, to pray to a mysterious image of the Virgin Mary that appeared on the steamy window of the building.
Imagining the journey of Zhanggong and looking into the shift of value of a migrating religious object in different context and spaces, Beeld, as it both refers to “statue” and “image” in Dutch, discusses the iconography _("造像")of Zhanggong -- how his image is molded, constructed and manifested, and the iconography of moving image -- how the cinematic image can be constructed through neuro and mind, and how it can form beyond its signifiers.


Please email me for screener.

 
installation view, 2024
Offspring: Underbelly, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
photo by Gert Jan van Rooij


Tampa
plastic film, vinyl sticker, 3783 x 2334 cm

Tampa presents an image possessing the liminal form of Mary and a sitting Buddha. Over the period I have been thinking of how the studios of De Ateliers resemble the hall of a chapel with its 7-meter height ceilings and shape of windows. A point of view of looking up becomes a metaphor that recalls religious gestures of believing, and spatial relationships between prayer and god, often mediated and fulfilled by the religious icon.