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.

notes on carbonization 2021
film, digital (HD), color, stereo
20’ 31’’

In this film, the Chinese voice-over is telling one story about a monk, which I heard in my hometown during my childhood, while the visual is telling another story about a miner, which is filmed in former coal company town Shamokin, PA, US using the local resources and people I get to know from the street. The film is a result of suture. Conflicts and negotiations are continuously happening, between the visual and the audio; between the subject and its psychoanalytic object of desire in the narrative, as well as between me and the local American people at the coal country whom I filmed with.


installation view, 2021
Water Fire Arts Center, Providence, RI, US installation view, 2023
Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China


click here to watch the trailer