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.

I was Born in a Company
Photography
variable sizes

I was not born in a place, but in a company called Central Shandong Mining Co., LTD. It is a state- owned mining company town in China, which has all the self-sufficient institutions and facilities such as hospital, TV station and movie theatre. When I was a child, I once believed that every place was named after a company.
Between 2000 and 2022, the company was privately owned, then bought by the state again. I documented the people and industry dealing with market economy and urbanization during that period, and reflect upon socialist collectivism as both an affection tie and a political structure.



installation view, 2023
lightbox, wooden frames, archival pigment print
Breathing Underneath, Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China

installation view, 2024
wooden frames, metal frames, archival pigment print
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, China