Zifen (Eric) Zhuang

Zifen (Eric) Zhuang is a London-based designer and artist from Xiamen, China. 

He enrolled in the Foreign Languages Department of Nanjing University, majoring in English Literature, with a minor in Art and Cultural Innovation. While he was an undergraduate, he had many opportunities to meet artists and designers, as well as to identify his own direction and interests through practice.

Focusing on those that are not clearly defined and categorised, he develops a multi-media practice to narrate his reflections visually.

A rather important word in my practice is ‘fluidity’, which closely connects and inspires all aspects of my practice. It is related to identity, not only limited to gender, but also to the construction of my flowing identity in cultural contexts, in everyday life, and in the virtual world. It brings me an obscure perspective that is always moving, enables me to document and archive the context, the curved lines, the body, memories and intimacies.

Its flowing nature endows me with the capacity to distort things in their forms and thus carry the potential to be visually transformed into those metaphors accumulated through my practice. It inspires me to constantly deconstruct and reconstruct what I see and feel, to translate and recreate a moment, a subtle feeling in my experience. The reframing process applies visual language, often in the form of graphic or moving images, to communicate gently and metaphorically - not declaratively, pedagogically or critically - in a slow manner.