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. 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.

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 strategy. 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. Image-making, in this way, turns into a process of alchemy for me.


installation view, 2024
Offspring: Underbelly, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
installation view, 2024
Photographic 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.