↖Evian Wenyi Zhang
↖CV

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化身(huàshēn), Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal







The title came to mind when one of my paintings asked me to hand-carve a trampoline-like structure from wild oak. I realized I was carving the limbs of a Buddhist deity, and casting the brass joints as his golden jewelry—a message of invincible power. I imagined him entitled to transform into any state of being. The trampoline, therefore, is his 化身.

- Evian’s notes

Studying the politics of appearance, Evian Wenyi Zhang presents a new body of work titled 化身 (huàshēn)—loosely translated as "incarnation" or "embodiment." Through her iconic, grid-based methodology of reading images, Zhang shapes the incarnations of lonely deities residing within "Asian" diasporic objects that have been circulated globally, imprisoned, and redefined by Western museums.

The term 化身 (huàshēn) carries philosophical depth: 化 (huà) denotes transformation, while 身 (shēn) designates the body as a vessel of presence. Together, they suggest a passage from an immaterial condition to a tangible form, mirroring Zhang’s artistic process where works become spectral embodiments of the colonial gaze. Her systematic approach begins with the arbitrary appropriation and recomposition of online images of Asian artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Berlin). Through this selective gesture, Zhang enacts a political intervention that exposes the orientalist fascination under which these objects were originally acquired, classified, and preserved by museological institutions since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This artistic trajectory stems from a sense of guilt: as a Chinese artist living outside her native context, Zhang confronted her own infatuation with how the Met presents Asian artifacts, reflecting on this response as a form of internalized orientalism. This realization prompts her to distinguish between the two institutional collections. The Met's holdings, largely built on private donations, function as a simulacra of individual projection and upper-class consumption of the "Orient." In contrast, the Berlin museum's collection represents a systematic, pseudo-scientific survey of Asia—a pedagogical effort designed to study and alienate the "Other." Observing her culture through a refracted lens shaped by historical trade, Zhang moves away from everyday references toward these publicly accessible, functionally didactic images of collective knowledge, reshaping them through sensory, emotional, and forensic methods.

In these small canvases mounted on metal structures, Zhang charts ocular saccadic movements (1), offering perceptive possibilities where original objects reorganize through “statistical tabulations.” Similarly, her sculptures arise from processes of reorganization tied to perception and memory. Using a heterogeneous assemblage of readily available materials, they echo the forms, textures, colors, and emotional resonance of each deconstructed painting while diverging to become entirely new entities. Painting and sculpture thus converge as visual microcosms that slip beyond their original semantic context into subjective fixations born from arbitrary discovery.

By adopting the original, often reductive titles assigned by Western institutions out of cultural alienation, she has this project in response to art historian Clémentine Deliss’s The Metabolic Museum (2020), which advocates for anachronistic, anomalous spaces that invite non-unitary reflection on the existing materials. By distancing objects from prior epistemologies where the museum is the sole holder of truth, Zhang’s project generates its own metabolism.

Zhang conceives a project of displacement and reinscription arising from continuous translation, where images are reborn into new forms. Described by the artist as a “visual version” of Tarek Atoui’s The Reverse Collection / The Reverse Sessions—which recorded ancient instruments to engineer new ones from their sounds—Zhang’s process uses visual fragments to reconstruct new bodies that carry formal reverberations. Like “deconstructing a poem to write another one using the same characters” (2), Zhang’s works reveal the fragility of historical image-making and consumption, allowing them to unfold within a transforming field of sensorial experience.

(1) The informational processing guiding the selection of “areas of interest” derives from cognitive mechanisms accompanying rapid variations in vision even when observing static objects, instating an “embodied perception” that dissolves Cartesian dualism. Rearranged in grid tabulations, Zhang’s process echoes the modernist grid system identified by Rosalind Krauss (1979), which rejects representation in favor of formal autonomy, generating perceptual relationships that allow new forms and resonances to emerge.

(2) Quote from an email sent by Evian Wenyi Zhang to curator Clémentine Deliss regarding her presentation at Galeria Pedro Cera.

Press

Contemporânea: The Afterlives of Images: Evian Wenyi Zhang's Huàshēn