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 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.

YUANDAN,2022 2022
2 channel video
12’00’’

In the last days of Xiaowa Village, I tied my GoPro onto a goat, where it recorded the birth and death of another goat during their everyday life. Due to land collapsing in the local area which resulted from the heavy mining in the past decades, the village has been torn down. Local villagers were relocated to nearby high-rise apartments, and the goats were the very last dwellers in the village. This video studies the movement of penning, the affect generated from identifying with a non-human body, and the conflicts condensed through the claustrophobic experience of the goats. It explores the condition of the animal lying among life, meat and machine, as well as the disjunction between personal experience and social change in contemporary China.

installation view, 2023
Breathing Underneath, Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China
installation view, 2023
Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth, Woonhuis, Amsterdam, Netherlandsinstallation view, 2023
De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands