Tianyi Zhang graduated with her BFA from the Photography department of Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She then traveled to America and started her master program in the Photographic and Electronic Media program at the Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA).
Zhang is a multi-media artist who works in photography, performance, digital film and social media. Throughout Zhang’s work, she explores patterns of behavior and communication in our current over-saturated media and social environment. She creates interactive performances where simple habitual gestures are emphasized to explore cultural pressures, expectations and identity. Recently, Zhang created a series of works that originated with performances in actual classrooms. With a humorous nod to YouTube “how to” videos, she draws connections between pedagogy and it’s darker counterpart, indoctrination.
Ling Liu is a Sound and Lens based artist who works in photography, sound, video and visual art.
“Were it possible to actually record or reproduce reality, only reality itself would be the question. My work doesn’t dispute the actuality of a world that is present, but rather that it is just probable and contingent, that it is unrepresentable as fact. Reality is, in a word, insufficient. Instead my work intends to undo the summary world of things in favor of a world harnessing the uncontrollable, improbable spheres of the imagination, remembrance, confession, trauma, sublimation – psychological signifiers whose expression cannot be fixed nor remain static, will not remain voiceless or unspoken, will be painful, or heartbreaking, or confrontational, expressed in raw emotion, or privately crushing. My work isn’t aimed at recognition and assent; it delves into the issues of grief, loss, power, pain, guilt, remorse, mental illness, sexual and gender identity, misogyny, memory, repression, love – emotions and experiences that shroud the everyday world in a haze of anguish and maybe also a certain beauty.
My work traverses media of all and any kind. Each brings it’s own possibility, each its own necessity, each its distinctive response to a world that is less marked by its mere presence, and more characterized by an astonishing array of random chaotic collisions and potential meanings triggered consciously and unconsciously by illogical, irrational, implausible, uncertain, unknown, unrecognized, unpredictable forces, and too often nearly unendurably necessary associations…“
