Anqi Zhang (she/her) uses curating and painting as the primary medium to explore the relationship between individual bodies, spatial power, visual representations and labelized discourses. She is interested in how queer bodies and pop culture intersected with race and authority to be represented, narrated, and transformed in the shifting cultural contexts she is encountering.
Anqi Zhang
Anqi Zhang's practice positions the body as a collection of influences from cultural, historical, social, the other, and political aspects, and uses bodily sensations as a gateway to rethink these aspects. Her curatorial research refers to curating the body to share the liveness that transcends the boundaries of language and enables transnational exchange. She chooses the queer body as an object of study in response to the policy as a geographical boundary to determine the visibility.
She explores how the queer body as performer or spectator is shaped in different spacial contexts, by investigating the institutional power, visual representations, descriptive discourses, or historical control behind the perception. She uses a comparison between ‘queer clubs' and 'art institutions' from the screening mechanism, security policies, social functions, and archiving approaches as an entry point, to uncover the potential intersected spatial functions and to evaluate how these elements construct the space and thus bring (new) physical sensations to the bodies of the people in it. In doing so, she also focuses on how the queer body expands its self-definition to develop innovative viewing relationships and self-archiving through performances, around the intersections of identity, bodily experience, and spaces, that challenge institutional authority and question the 'revision' of heteronormative-based approaches to history.
Her writing research is placed in the context of the constant daily production and circulation of images, videos, and texts in the digital age, pointing towards how queer bodies and pop culture intertwined with race and authoritative powers, represented, narrated, and transformed on different platforms in the shifting cultural contexts she encounters.
By rethinking and questioning the context behind the spatial sensations, discourses, and images, she hopes to create a cross-border imagination that has more inclusivity, and less intuitive classification, for individuals in the queer community and beyond.