Leah Zhang 张紫璇  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.

zzixuan811@gmail.com



list of works:

Rehearsal
BEELD 相
In Emptiness there is no Form 空中无色
Constellations
YUANDAN, 2022
Fossil Morphology
Absolute Purity 绝对纯洁
The Future Semiotics of A.S.M.R.
I was Born in a Company
Truthful Imaginary
Eyes in Mountains
zzixuan811@gmail.com
+31 647292780

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.



Constellations 2023
Photography

After the 2022 protest, I went into the mine in my hometown. While covid quickly spread inside the underground tunnels and miners fell ill one after another, I wore a mask and try to photograph the caves in the mine. In the most sensitive air, my camera failed to focus, and the dust appeared  in the foreground. Dust, typically removed during the post-production of photography, is in fact carrying rich information about the labor environment — a negative space that have not been admitted and cared for. 
Constellations is a series photos evoking the dusty respiratory tract of the labor disease and that of the industrial infrastructures, reversely filling up and wrapping the space with its presence.