Lucy Zhang

Lucy Zhang is a Pittsburgh-based artist with roots in northeastern China. They work across many mediums such as photography, painting, writing, and installation, and often adopt processes of appropriation, meditation, and dreaming. Lucy’s practice explores relationships between family, memory, environment, and cultural history, and considers different ways of knowing, being, and connecting.

Statement:
As a person of diaspora, there are parts of me that end and parts of me that live on in disparate timelines and geographies; the sense of fragmentation that ensues is a primary motive for my work. Seeking to reconcile different parts of my identity, I use art as a process of retrieving, holding, contemplating, nurturing, transforming, and honoring aspects of myself.

My work often features fragile assemblages and faded imagery, and draws upon archival, natural, and family materials in an effort to bridge connections across time and space I am otherwise disconnected from. As I make claims to my roots with limited familial, cultural, and ecological knowledge, I question ideas of authenticity and access, and reach into the past as a means of moving forwards.

At the core of my practice, I aim to create new political and spiritual ecologies of home: how people, things, and places are held together, how they might fall apart, how we all know each other deeply. I embrace friction, fragmentation, and forgetting as powerful, intimate, and meaningful states of being, and seek to reimagine dreaming as intrinsic and necessary to the diasporic condition.

Photo courtesy of the artist