Vivien Zhang

Vivien Zhang grew up in various places and from this experience came Zhang’s growing desire to reclaim her original Chinese culture from subjects of immediate interest to her. In the past years she has been revisiting specific Chinese objects of significance and she was intensively interested in these cultural relics. Their role defined her relationship with the audience in a ‘contemporary’ and ‘displaced’ context, and allowed her to explore personal concerns relating ti displacement, transexperience and diaspora.

For this interest she has slowly achieved an abstraction of the vessel motif in her paintings. This reduction of motif is a direct reflection of her declining exclusive obsession with these objects.  By exploiting her familiarity with these objects’ structure, Zhang’s paintings have been reduced to abbreviation of marks, in order to achieve the essential qualities – ‘the powerful’ and ‘the bizarre’.

Her most recent paintings have been directed to investigate the ‘phenomenon’ of paintings and the use of formulas and processes in artistic practice, as a response to her long engagement with the vessel motif. Her paintings have now evolved in a self-sufficient cycle - in which the motif from earlier work informs other gestures in the painting to become new forms.

From this long process of re-evaluating and re-negotiating the significance of the motifs – their hierarchy, the space and the schematism present –a system and pre-determined formulas came into being in Zhang’s practice. This includes specific measurement for repetitive shapes (continuously challenged by ‘interruptions’ and ‘fractures’), grid systems, the pre-planned stencils, and loading the brush methodically.  

Exhibited at Griffin Gallery in Saatchi Art’s Showdown: In Glorious Colour in April 2014.

BORN

1990, Beijing, China

EDUCATION

MA in Painting - Royal College of Art, London, 2014

BA Fine Art (First Class) - Slade School of Fine Art - University College London, 2012

International Baccalaureate Bilingual Diploma - New International School of Thailand, Bangkok, 2008 

(Last updated 11.12.2014)