Ziruo Zhang

In my creation, I have persistently pursued the interconnections between the culture, geography, individuals, and religion of my hometown in Northeast China, exploring their realms of existence and survival. Through the medium of moving images, I have extensively revised the textual narratives centered around the shark motif, striving to strike a delicate balance between the "foreign" and the "local." By adopting the perspective of the shark and employing a first-person narrative approach, I try to forge a connection between the realms of reality and the spiritual world. Besides, I have made a series of modifications to the creation of my short stories, establishing a profound intertextual and contrasting relationship with the shark news, ultimately introducing a collective thematic exploration encompassing freedom and slavery, deception and truth, as well as survival and mortality.

Finally, I sought to conclude the overarching theme with an installation : the Ascension Ritual. Within my works, the protagonists inevitably confront the outcome of death, constrained by historical epochs and human agency. The introduced Ascension Ritual serves as the culminating chapter of the entire project, leaving an open-ended conclusion—whether the soul finds solace still remains an uncertain.

Ziruo Zhang, completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Mural Painting and Public Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University. She is currently pursuing her studies in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Zhang grew up in Shenyang, and currently based in Beijing and London. Her artistic practice primarily revolves around the mediums of moving image, installation, and text, involving a variety of media.

Her practice delves into the intricate relationship between authenticity and fictionality within contemporary art narratives. Her works are grounded in magical realism and often incorporate grotesque narrations, referencing to cultural markers and symbols rooted in northeast China. Zhang questions metaphoric apparition by way of delving into subconscious scripting territories around hallucinations of materialist manifestations. She aims to create distinctive universes of visual tensions between the past and future, thus expressing a unique dialogue between religion, politics and geography.

With her work, Zhang invites viewers to reflect and ask themselves questions that might lead to individual and collective transformation.

I created this ritual by drawing inspiration from various religious "ascension ceremonies," simplifying the most essential elements into ladders, metal crossbars, trees, and ropes. The exploration of the origins and inquiries into specific religions is the initial inspiration and behind my practice. All my works stem from my personal experiences of my deceased grandma's beliefs and our relationship. Therefore, rituals play a significant role in my process. For the two stories I created, I wanted this ritual to provide an open-ended conclusion. In the ladder of the ritual, the last crossbar is without metal, leaving the question of whether the characters in the story find a "destination" or "repose." This idea stems from my grandma, who wished to perform good deeds throughout her life and eventually reach the Western Pure Land. However, no one knows whether she achieved her wish. Furthermore, through this design, I aim to express my understanding of the world—I do not agree that every story must have a happy ending. In fact, the world is constantly evolving towards chaos, and the ultimate trajectory of a story will not change within my personal will. Therefore, what I can do is provide a ritual for them, while leaving the ending to the imagination of the audience.

A rope rose into the sky. The monk asked the young man to climb the rope and guide the young man to disappear into people's vision. Finally, the monk threw his knife into the sky, and the young man's ribs fell to the ground one by one.

Medium:

ladder, rope, tree, metal, stone, straw, bench

Size:

2.5m*2.4m*2.5m

contemporary installation

In the context of religion, shamanism often manifests as mythology based on the need to address real crises. Rituals are used to resolve practical and spiritual crises. Human rituals, on the other hand, aim to replicate the prototypes of myths. This repetition contains the notion of suspending secular time and placing individuals in a "religious time" of sorcery. It bears no direct connection to actual time but constitutes the "eternal present" of mythological time.

Medium:

moving image, 1080p

Size:

07:39:03

contemporary moving-image

There is an old store in the city called Dadong Food Store. It seems that it will be renovated recently, and an aquarium may be built to keep sharks brought in from the south. The two brothers had never seen a shark before, and they discussed going there to earn some extra money after they finished their work, maybe they could see this odd foreign thing.

Shouyang heard that when some fish see a flash of light in the tank, they will speed up and rush towards the direction of the light until they hit their heads and bleed. "Doesn't the fish know there's a piece of glass?" he asked. "What does a fish know? Its fate is to be eaten." Shougang twisted the butt of his cigarette on the edge of his rubber shoes.

Shouyang and Shougang

"Shouyang and Shougang" story portrays the tragic journey of two men from Northeast China struggling to survive in the era of massive layoffs, encountering crises, and inevitably becoming victims of the times. In this work, I also emphasized the relationship between image and text, the translation between them. From my perspective, images serve both as interpretations and departures from the text. I used AI painting software to transform my short stories into images. Both the texts and images retain traces of "imitation." In terms of texts, my creations are based on extensive reading of similar Northeastern literary novels, combined with some personal experiences from my elders. Similarly, AI images are based on extensive data analysis.

After numerous layers of overlapping, I tried to discern the remaining balance between reality and illusion in my artwork. This has always been an important question in my literary creation: how much in the work is fictional, and how much is real? Does authenticity matter in literature? What makes a work resonate with people? Through the medium of texts, I express my perspectives on the world, and AI serves as a tool that adds an element of unreality to them. In the AI software, I continuously refine my prompts to achieve the desired images, just as I revise and polish texts to achieve the desired effects. The subjective and unconscious "imitation" also makes me think authenticity, originality, and identity. What constitutes the "originality" of a work? Is it important for the audience to seek what is real and what isn’t?

PDF: Shouyang and Shougang

full version

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text

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flexible

contemporary text

Ziruo Zhang

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Royal College of Art