Huaqian Zhang
Medium-term residency
January - June 2023
Huaqian Zhang, Wenzhou, 1997
Huaqian is a transdisciplinary artist: they do not know whether they are drawing patterns for a suit or blueprints for a building, weaving a scarf or wiring a circuit board, writing essays or filming diaries. Sometimes they cannot tell living and dreaming apart.
They seek to establish ties between art and design. Art as a means to deal with the world —a processor fed with critical analysis as its input, obtaining a disruptive output—, and design as the translation of such results to technified and systematized products.
Their practice sets out from micro-observations of daily life, later expanding them into macro-fictions. Everything can be a reason to start an investigation, as long as the knowledge produced is aware of its standpoints. Their works explore the mutual constitution between reality and virtuality, subject and object, nature and culture, bodies and buildings, economies and ecologies. They operate across scales, stacking layers of complexity and generating recursive narratives. These works show how such binaries are rather interrelated and not separate.
For them, a continuous examined engagement with everydayness is necessary to produce new f(r)ictions.
Former residences: Short term residency (April – June 2022)
