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 (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.
list of works:
Solar
Rehearsal
BEELD 相
In Emptiness there is no Form 空中无色
Constellations
YUANDAN, 2022
Fossil Morphology
notes on carbonization
Breathing
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.
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, as well as in failures of representations these shifts produce.
Leah currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Solar 2026
Produced by Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains and Twelve Oaks Film Art Inc.
film, photography
24’37’’
In an underground mine built during the Cultural Revolution, two crews are making images: one for the local press, the other for the artist. Navigating through the caves, they illuminate the labor environment and discuss visibility in the darkness. Here, the histories of political sacrifice, material extraction, and prehistoric image-making converge. Yet the pursuit of clarity repeatedly fails.
China’s industrial spaces are often represented as highly organized systems of labor, resources, and value. By contrast, photographing or filming inside the mine as a physically demanding job, evokes how nature rejects the attempt to reveal, or to pursue efficiency with this clarity.
Returning this act of image-making to the underground, Solar weaves together two caves from parallel histories: the ancient one that bears the earliest human images, and the contemporary one that initiates the material cycle of image-making.I have been dreaming of making a film about darkness and blindness.
In Chinese, the word for cinema is 电影, meaning “electric shadows.” Rooted in shadow puppetry, the term describes an image whose form is activated by shadow instead of light. For Solar, this understanding of cinema becomes a particular poetics of shadow: filmmaking in the unseen, and moments when nature is encountered by chance.
