Zhan Zhang
Zhan Zhang is an artist who specializes in freehand papercut art. Zhan's work focuses on transformative arts and mixed media arts, the style explores a poetic approach that contemporized traditional Chinese paper-cutting aesthetics with a touch of surrealism and fantasy.
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Zhan has a marketing and events management background, and uses motion graphics and live paper-cutting performances to tell more diverse stories.
Education
2008-2012
University of Toronto
Toronto
Honors B.A. Major in Visual Arts and Specialist in Arts Management (Double Majors)
2016-2017
Seneca College
Toronto
Post Graduate Degree, Major in 3D Animation and Media Arts
Selected Group Exhibition
2024
Northern Contemporary Gallery
Toronto
All The Small Things
2024
University of Toronto
Toronto
U of T Charitable Fashion Show, Wearable Arts Installations
2023
Eastend Arts
Toronto
In View, Under The Moonlight (A Nuit Blanche Associated Project)
2023
Long Winter
Toronto
Long Winter Art Show
Selected Press and Publications
2023
CanCulture
Toronto
Artist Apprentice
2015
Artist Assistant
Toronto
Artist Assistant to Yael Brotman
2014
Artist Assistant
Toronto
Artist Assistant to Phillip Beesley Studio
Artist Statement
Life is a fragile thing, as fragile as paper. I work within this fragility to cut out unnerving yet beautiful scenes, in which the valid reality is sincerely replaced with bizarrely combined events and objects. The meaning of logical human experience is no longer worth mentioning, yet magic and strange beauty are found in irrational visuals.
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Cutting paper embeds symbolic meanings in my art, I applied the ancient art form to the surrealist aesthetic and initiated my unique style, which is to cut lines instead of hollows, through which the paper seems intact but scattered with scars. This art technique creates highly textured, three-dimensional patterns that reference biomorphic shapes, and are seemingly ever-shapeshifting in responding to light.
The distorted figures and depiction of perverse sexuality aim to put viewers inside a moment to experience the dreams and unconscious. In that world, inanimate things and animate things, animals, plants and people were all mixed together, and the laws of the real world no longer played any role.
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The Humanoid Series
I hope viewers experience the loneliness, the confusion, the absurd, and the divinity in a single glance, and question the reality surrounding us through my figure design art series.
The main theme of this series is separation and loneliness. The body that has lost its desire is pulled and squeezed by reality. It is naked but asexual. There are stories that appear in the picture, and there are behaviors and interactions that go against common sense. I used animation to deepen this look and feel, showing a sense of dynamic fragmentation.
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The main theme of this series is separation and loneliness. The body that has lost its desire is pulled and squeezed by reality. It is naked but asexual. Some stories appear in the picture, and some behaviors and interactions go against common sense. I used animation to deepen this look and feel, showing a sense of dynamic fragmentation.
My divine characters are ignorantly loving to humans. Demi-god creatures references have a primitive sense of wildness, and even their cruel behaviors are out of unopened chaos rather than conscious malice.
These characters combine the roles of girls and mothers, and the eroticism of sexual desire is shaved off, which is what the concept of women feels to me, rather than the sexy women in the eyes of men.
This art series also experiments with a concept: whether the original concept can be perceived after using incorrect methods to express it.
Just like whispers floating in the mist, we neither know who is speaking nor can we clearly hear what it is saying. It is an ethereal thing that floats between reality and illusion, and is unabashedly weird, and an uneasy and confusing premonition of facing an unknown world without reproducing a clear image of the world we are familiar with.