Lian Zhang
Lian Zhang was born in 1984 in Hangzhou, China, currently lives and works in London.
My working practice is based upon a practice of assembling constellations of images through which a serial network of fractured narratives, start to emerge. Partly this involves a splicing together of the imaginary and reality in ways that break up the logic of both realms and syntax of images. The process of fracturing opens out the process to differing velocities so the paintings might appear in a state of arrest or suspension, as being in slow motion or even subject to the blur of speed. It is as the underlying laws pertaining to physical reality are transformed but the way in which images might start to cohere into their departure from the habitual. If images are subject to the process of fragmentation, then temporality is likewise, and in this way, new and surprising conjunctions might yield from the folding operations of interiority and exteriority. There are two types of drawing in my work, one pertaining to the inscription of figures and forms and one that draws lines pertaining to invisible abstractions. Painting is the means of discovering just how these two orders of inscription might cohere together. Recently a shift has started to occur in my work. There is the same kind of multiplicity and fragmentation, but it is directed away from the memory of either collage or cinematic montage toward the construction of imaginary mood-scapes in which traces of memory surface but without definite anchorage. They might be drifting apart from any sense of fixed determination or stylistic will. I might say that this is born out of hybridity as a critical concept but that is a far too lazy term because it implies a critical operation or device. Instead the word fascination comes to mind because it evokes the suspension of both time and will.
