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 biomorphic figure represents the artist and his identity

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.

Repetition is an audio-visual installation project investigating the act of reading online novels as a behavioral medium and its potential to become inward self-meditation, particularly for Generation Z.

Informed by Marshall McLuhan's theory of the medium as the message, the project illuminates how this mediated experience communicates fictional narratives, multicultural encounters, social interactions and digital reading experiences. It shifts focus to the highly repetitive and formulaic nature of online novels, investigating their assembly-line culture driven by mass production and standardized templates.

Poem-like paragraphs are crafted by the artist as visual fiction depicting a meditative journey, where imagination intertwines with light, shadows, abstract forms, figures, plants and natural landscapes, creating a tranquil atmosphere.

By training an AI model using fixed prompt words as a template, the artist inserts the paragraphs to generate visually diverse photographs. This iterative process involves repetitive training, selection and the artist's creative touch.

Repetition provides an intimate conceptual space for the audience to engage with visual fiction and embark on a meditative journey. The fragmented narration and viewing experiences gently communicate moments and emotions in a slow and contemplative manner, encouraging introspection and connection.

Sound excerpt from Ryuichi Sakamoto and Taylor Deupree's 2014 live performance in London.