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.

YUANDAN,2022 2023
2 channel video
12’00’’


This work addresses the displacement of a village due to land collapse caused by heavy mining. It is filmed from the perspective of a goat, the last inhabitants in the village trapped in an unremovable pen. The goat recorded the death and birth of another goat in the winter of 2022.
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