↖Evian Wenyi Zhang
↖CV

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Homecoming, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, US







In early spring 2024, I went to Malaysia. It was both a business trip and a homecoming—with a brief stopover in Shanghai. Upon returning to Berlin, I made these works. I trust the immediacy of this experience: unfiltered travel photos freshly collected during this trip.

The grid paintings are built from these casual fragments from that month of travel: an antique abacus found at a Penang flea market, a snapshot of a friend’s artwork at the Shanghai Biennale, the lobby of my hotel, a portrait of my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend discovered while cyberstalking, and two stray images saved from the Chinese social media platform Red Note—one of them a bead curtain, the other a broken electric toothbrush whose button had been chewed off by a pet parrot. To clarify a sequence of translation that might otherwise seem confusing: the whole process moves deliberately from source images, to grids, and finally to abstract photography.

Witnessing how the grid strips an image of its literal subject while leaving a residue of visual data, I wanted to replicate the materiality of what remained. In my Berlin apartment, I began creating domestic assemblages, photographing them under abstract conditions to mimic—as closely as possible—the exact visual and textural qualities of specific fragments within the paintings. Entirely pragmatic, not symbolic. Do these secondary images still carry the oceanic breeze of the tropics? Attempting to capture that distant breeze within a chaotic, cluttered domestic setting in Berlin became, in itself, a quietly absurd exercise.

Looking through my iPhone album, I realized this casual flow of images captures “homecoming” as a duality. In the Chinese consciousness, Southeast Asia is almost synonymous with vacation resorts. For me, it is my spiritual hometown—a longing born in youth, when I wasn’t allowed to travel alone to escape the winter. Though the “hai” in Shanghai means ocean, the city offers only a depressing, dusty coastline, a consequence of being the mouth of the Yangtze River, which built its commercial prosperity.

When I was living in Shanghai, I watched a soap opera on Netflix. The male protagonist longs for a married man. However, their relationship can never be formalized due to his family, illness, and financial constraints. Therefore, he expresses his desire for freedom and love, which he cannot attain, by imagining himself going to Bali with the person he loves. In high school, my personality was too melodramatic, so I imagined myself caught in the same predicament as the protagonist. Bali, or Southeast Asia, became my spiritual hometown. When warmth mixes with moisture, it produces a distinct smell that simply doesn’t exist in Shanghai—an absence of warmth that has become a poetic metaphor for a certain emotional or cultural lack I now experience in colder, Western regions.

Shanghai is my actual hometown; I spent the first eighteen years of my life there. My nostalgia always carries a trace of resentment toward it. For this generation, the city’s air feels thick with a singular, unspoken mission: to run away from this country. Shanghai operates on a deeply internalized loop of self-hatred; it is a hyper-modern metropolis that simultaneously suffers from a chronic colonial hangover, constantly invalidating its own identity to worship the foreign gaze. This psychic friction is so intense that I cannot maintain my mental well-being if I stay there longer than two weeks. The city demands a strange, psychological gymnastics: even when I am physically walking its streets, I have to disassociate and adopt an estranged, Western perspective just to appreciate its beauty. To be a Shanghainese local is, paradoxically, to find yourself structurally incompatible with loving the locality. I felt forced to become a tourist in the place that birthed me.

Since moving away from Shanghai, I had barely noticed how the geographical orientation of my own feelings had shifted. Yet in Malaysia, I found myself experiencing nostalgia through the borrowed perspective of a Shanghai native looking southward. It is a distinctly non-Western observation of memory and geography.

-Evian’s notes

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The unique pictorial practice of Evian Wenyi Zhang seeks to address contemporary image consumption. Deploying a special technique that isolates and repeats instances of specific, enigmatic imagery, Zhang depicts these instances on small discrete canvases, which are then arranged into a grid. The paintings in this exhibition are made with airbrush and accompanied by framed photographs which do not consist of source material, but rather quasi-abstract corollaries thereof, functioning like pendants on the paintings. 

Vacillating between the forensic and obsessive, Zhang’s analytical approach to images brings up everything from historical cubism to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up to the photographic collages of David Hockney, not to mention Roland Barthes' idea of the punctum. It is as if she has zeroed in on the punctums of a given photo, circumscribed them, and then repeated them, with slight shifts of perspective, in an attempt to disclose their spellbinding appeal. Indeed, what she creates are as much analytical interrogations of photos as they are productions of images, which are not without a certain pathos– that of seeking to arrest the endless, nonhierarchical flow of digital images and inscribing it into something epistemic and human (hence, perhaps, the painting). The source material for the images tend to draw from the artist’s own personal experiences of the world and screens through which it is often interfaced, referencing her travels, romantic life, and memes. This particular body of work is based on images collected during a short period of time she spent in South East Asia, a region of the world that she associates with vacation-taking as a Chinese national. After such a long time abroad, she experienced the visit as a kind of “Homecoming.” 

When all is said and done, while Zhang’s work feels bracingly contemporary, it is rooted in the classical, in the sense of Baudelaire’s dualistic definition of modernity: “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art of which the other is the eternal and immutable.” What she makes ultimately offers numerous ways to reflect on our contemporary relationship to images while proposing an entirely novel approach to the oldest known artistic medium, painting.

- Chris Sharp