2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition

My practice includes installation, sculpture, photography, and painting. I explore the blurry boundary between consciousness and subconscious, reality and fantasy, space and flatness. As an individual who is a part of the generation of “Big Study Abroad for Chinese,” I discovered my identity by adopting both Western and Eastern philosophies, while struggling and shuffling between these two.

I care about invisible communities, those people who are wandering outside of the mainstream. I love everyone who belongs to this community, and I identify myself as one of them and am proud of being one of them. In my installation Tool Portrait, I choose objects—those that are functional and essential but usually not seen in our lives, including clothes hangers, door latches, door knobs, lamp holders, and cogs—and I recreate them on a larger scale using wood and wall patch. This process removes their functionality: instead, the sculptures serve as a way for me to appreciate the objects’ existence in the world.

Zhiyi Zhang (b. 1994, Huaian, Jiangsu) is a New York-based artist. Her practice includes installation, sculpture, photography, and painting. After graduating from Miami University, she worked in a finance company in Shanghai. After working as one of the corporate slaves, she got tired of the capitalist world. 

She is interested in exploring the possibility of the materials: she sees clay as the flesh of bodies, rice paper as skins, and glass as eyeballs. She likes to walk, to breathe, to live, as an invisible man. She loves walking in the shadows, observing the liverwort growing, watching insects growing vigorously. She loves to watch those who are standing under the light.