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.

BEELD
film, installation
38’00’’

In 1996, the Chinese Buddhist statue Zhanggong was acquired by a Dutch collector. A mummy of a monk, who died 1000 years ago, was discovered inside. Later, the statue began its journey into hospitals, museums, and the collector’s repository. Throughout the journey, the statue was taken as a mummy, a work of art, a commodity and a Buddha. A few years later, in Tampa, Florida, people gathered in front of a finance building, to pray to an image of the Virgin Mary that appeared on its steamy window. How does an image become an icon?
Imagining Zhanggong’s journey through the Netherlands, the film presents reenacted scenarios of different people involved in the trip: excited doctors, meditating curator, hesitant collector, and a museum security guard frightened by the biological remains in an art museum. The fascination with the body in modern European history knows no end.
Beeld, as it both refers to “statue” and “image” in Dutch, discusses the iconography ("造像") behind the complicated identities and value of this migrating religious object -- how his image is molded, constructed and manifested, and how it was eventually read beyond its signifier.



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, 378.3 x 233.4 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.