In Emptiness There Is No Form 2024
3-channel film, installation
14’30’’
In the past years, I have been making work about extraction and alchemy, and thinking about how it sensorially ties to the energy of collectivism. It started off as a subject but has gradually evolved into a poetics. The underground for me is not only a place of the unseen and the subliminal, but also an exciting realm where things are surging and vibrating.
This work documents the movements in an active iron-ore mine, originally built in 1970s China. It studies the energy, force and gravity generated from the regulated and rhythmic movement of labor, the movement of the machines, the cinematic movement, and my involuntary body that trembles together with the earth. The energy from geology, collective labor, industry, and spirit gathers with speed. Image-making, in this way, turns into a process of alchemy for me.
“Leah Zhang’s portrayal of body and machine is met in their three-channel video installation filmed in the artist’s hometown in China. The film documents or represents spatial movements at work in a metal mine; in the vast time space divide of the underground. China’s production of materials such as aluminum, copper, lead and zinc has soared as the country has become the world’s factory floor. These aspects are met viscerally in the film and center around the artist’s careful portrayal of movement. As we traverse this space, we become part of the camera’s movement within vertical shafts, chambers, and oscillating headlights. The artist’s titular “image as alchemy,” recalls metallurgy in action, and points to the weight of the industry and the ocular tension created. Sight and sound pulsate and rumble in this multi-sensorial experience: vibrational movements of the environs, the earth and geology, and the artist trembling with it. This energetic fever is not only representational, but strategical. As Zhang underlines, it is an ontological concern with film, the medium of film, and how it translates formally. “The underground for me is not only a place of the unseen and the subliminal, but also an exciting realm where things are surging and vibrating. Sometimes, I feel a strong impulse to return to the "origin" of materiality, especially in a world where everything is increasingly virtualized, where resources become mere symbols and distant events unfolding on a global scale. At this specific moment I urgently yearn to return to the eruption of energy.” Zhang has also included sculptural elements made from metal, chains, and metal tubes, almost having the same form as the miner’s elevator gates, which the miners themselves call the elevator ‘cage’. “It is like ‘cage’s gate’ which is completely functional but it is a surface of that 3D gate.” Quoted from Jennifer Teets, Underbelly: Offspring De Ateliers.
installation view, 2024
Offspring: Underbelly, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
installation view, 2024Photographic Geomancy, Times Museum, Guangzhou, China
photo by Feng Fangyu
Blue Rust
installation, metal, mine waste
Blue Rust is an installation designed for the exhibition of In Emptiness There Is No Form at the lecture room in De Ateliers. It mimics the structure of the gate of a cage -- the elevator that transports the miner down to the underground. The gate blocks the audience from entering the room and creates a point of view of looking. From the gate, you only see one screen depicting earth surface inside a descending elevator, where part of the chain strurcture also appears on the screen. More often, you see a descending dot from the helmet light. Blue Rust is coated with the mine waste of Central Shandong Mining Co., LTD, which the company has been dumping into the hills for decades and eventually filled the gap between two hills. I was told by the miner that if the hills collapse, the whole town will be buried under the mine waste.