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 enormous (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.

Eyes in Mountains
Photography
variable sizes

Exhibition view 2022
Dizygotic Intergrowth I, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China

This work is completed during my stay in Canada, when I was travelling to the Rocky Mountains and the falls around. It explores tourism’s role as a mediation between human and Nature. It also attempts to examine the subjectivity of the non-human existence (namely, objects, animals, plants, etc.).


Nature is generally considered as an object of our gaze. However, when entering the mountains,
I found that Nature overwhelms humans and expresses itssubjectivity. Reverse to what we normally conceive of it, the natural beings cast their gaze upon humans. Humans, as intruders, stumble into the cosmos of Nature. The distinction between the seeing subjects and the objets seen is blurred,and they become interchangeable. This phenomenon fascinates me.

This project attempts to seek and reflect on the imagery of the “EYE”. Tourism offers a series of new ways to look at Nature on the one hand, and it also turns humans to the objects seen by nature on the other.