THE ORDINARY AND THE PECULIAR: STELLA ZHANG

In the last blog, I discussed the serene, eternal beauty in Masao Yamamoto’s photography. Today, let us take a look at a similar, tranquil beauty but with a surprising twist.

Pliability 2018 mixed media

Stella Zhang, also known as Zhang Shuang 张爽, is a Chinese contemporary artists known for her feminist sculptures, paintings, and installations. Her works challenge the gender scheme on body and sexuality. The stitches and tears are reminiscent of a tortured body, and the contrast between white and black further intensifies the tension between inequality and individuality, fear and desire, power and struggle.

untitled 2018 mixed media

Her use of ordinary materials in unconventional ways questions the viewer’s perspective, propelling them to reflect between the familiar and strange, exposed and veiled, soft and hard, female and male.

Token 2020 mixed media

In Cleanse, Zhang wraps stockings around a square box with pebbles inside. Below are two boxes with straws inside. The use of stocking, an accessory invoking association with femininity, in combination with rocks, which are often associated with nature and strength, creates a juxtaposition between tenderness and hard.

Cleanse 2020 mixed media

In Trapped, she wraps a pair of upside down high heels with bondage. The high heels invoke association with femininity and mobility, yet they are wrapped and thus trapped, imobile and stuck. The sculpture’s lack of colour also connects with a sense of purity and innocence, a feeling contrasted by the artwork’s mature and almost violent ideas. The unconventional use of daily objects and juxtaposition between different concepts and materials point to women’s lack of power and free will in contemporary society.

Trapped 2020 mixed media

Zhang further blends her feminist ideas with her Chinese culture. Her previous training in traditional Chinese painting allowed her to infuse Chinese aesthetic ideals into abstract mixed-media works, especially Daoism and Zen, where the idea of zero, 0, is a fundamental concept to her art. 0 invokes associations with nothingness, suggesting that at the beginning and end of everything, there is nothing, void of matter and meaning. This cyclical nature is further reinforced by the cyclical shape of 0. 0 is Zhang’s journey of life and a cycle of the changes in her inner universe.

The Monologues 2021 mixed media

She portrays this abstract, invisible, intangible idea with physical, visible, and tactile artworks. Her 2018 mixed media series Translucent takes an irregular shape of 0. Within it, fluid shapes flow and fuse into each other, creating an illusion of ever-changing forms reminiscent of the cosmos. In the centre of each 0 lies a single white dot, like another 0, suggesting the origin of the universe around it. All the 0s are void of colour, allowing the viewer to project their colourful world to Zhang’s cycle of void.

Translucent 2018 mixed media

The shape of the 0 also resembles the female organ, pointing to birth and implying the cycle of life and death. The connection to female genitalia also connects it with the origin of the universe; Zhang thus makes a strong feminist statement through these visual expressions, asserting the strength of women by connecting it with the constantly changing outer and inner world.

one of Translucent 2018 mixed media

Zhang said that she is “attracted to a type of beauty that is flexible and uncertain. Like a mood that is troubled and emotional, casual and sensitive…[She] [tries] to metaphorically open a new space with [her] work to remind the viewers to interact with the piece.” Her works are full of juxtaposition, reminding the viewer of a complex, changing world, both around them and inside them, and this world is the beauty, an intangible, abstract sense of beauty, Zhang searches. We are all searching for the entrance to this beautiful, invisible space.

Pliability 2018 mixed media installation