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.

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

This work tells a fantastical story about the metaphor of underground as a space for geological transformation as well as a space for breeding monsters. 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