Huaqian Zhang
Long-term residency
May 2024 - April 2026
Huaqian Zhang, Wenzhou, 1997
Huaqian is a transdisciplinary artist: they don’t know if they are drawing patterns for a suit or plans for a building, knitting a scarf or wiring a circuit board, writing essays or filming journals. Sometimes, they don’t distinguish between life and dreams.
They attempt to establish connections between art and design. Art as a means to confront the world —a processor fueled by critical analysis as input, producing a disruptive output—, and design as the translation of these results into technified and systematized products.
Their practice begins with micro-observations of daily life, then expands them into macro-fictions. Anything can serve as a reason to initiate an investigation, as long as the knowledge produced is aware of its points of reference. Their works explore the mutual constitution of reality and virtuality, subject and object, nature and culture, bodies and buildings, economies and ecologies. They operate across scales, layering complexity and generating recursive narratives. These works show how such binaries are more interrelated than separate.
For them, a continuous and examined engagement with the everyday is necessary to produce new frictions and f(r)ictions.
Former residences:
Short-term residency (April – June 2022)
Medium-term residency (January – June 2023)
