Tianyi Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans digital film, installations, animation, performance, and social media. Throughout her work, Zhang explores patterns of behavior and communication in the currently oversaturated media and social environments. She creates interactive performances using her own portrait, where simple, habitual gestures are emphasized to investigate the connections between private and collective experiences, cultural pressures, expectations, and identity.
She has been nominated for the Ashurst Artist Prize in London and has won the First International Film Festival in Xining. Her works have been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the Elijah Wheat Showroom, The Plaxall Gallery, and the Anthology Film Archive in New York, Brea Gallery in California, and The New Art Fest in Lisbon.
At MacDowell, Zhang worked on two new projects. One is an animation project using CCTV footage and daily documentation as materials. It involves searching, collecting, and rotoscoping CCTV footage to depict a real-life tragedy shaped by political coercion and power control. In the other project, she further explored the human body in digital and mechanized production by focusing on the iconic gestures and symbols associated with repetitive labor. She created a series of humorous yet profound “production devices” and a video artwork about “water armies” (paid digital commentators).
Portrait by Jiayu Wang
