Leah Zhang 张紫璇 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.

zzixuan811@gmail.com



list of works:

Rehearsal
BEELD 相
In Emptiness there is no Form 空中无色
Constellations
YUANDAN, 2022
Fossil Morphology
Absolute Purity 绝对纯洁
The Future Semiotics of A.S.M.R.
I was Born in a Company
Truthful Imaginary
Eyes in Mountains
zzixuan811@gmail.com
+31 647292780

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  complexity of value 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 currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Rehearsal 2024-ongoing
performance, video, text

Rehearsal is an ongoing performance project through which I teach people all over the world (and everywhere I go) to sing my grandma’s version of “Patriotic March”(愛国行進曲). It is a song she learnt 75 years ago from the Japanese Army who colonized her village during WWII; as well as a song she has altered and forgotten as her memory is influenced by dementia as well as the lack of practice. The performance mimics the form of rehearsal of a chorus.


First shown and performed at Sally’s Fault, Amsterdam, 2024. Special thanks to Sally’s Fault, Amsterdam.

“排练”是一个正在进行的表演项目，通过这个项目，我教世界各地的人们学唱我祖母版本的“爱国行进曲”。这是二战日军殖民时期，她在日军建设的小学里学习日语时每日练习的一首军歌。直到日军撤离为止，这首歌似乎永远在被排练。老了之后，祖母有时候会向子女们炫耀这首歌，但因痴呆症和缺乏练习，她慢慢改变了这首歌的曲调和歌词。