Zhiqian Wang (b. China, 1999) is an artist and filmmaker.
Her films often shot on Super 8, double 8mm, 16mm or assembled from archival footage, explore how indexical images intersect with language as a symbolic system. In This Story, We Live in the Future, In an Empty City, With Only One Apple Tree embrace contingency and spontaneity, capturing daily life on the streets through found objects and fleeting encounters with passersby. Floating balloons, fleeting clocks, lens flares through someone’s window, a beetle fell in front of the camera, an abandoned green apple, a lady dressed entirely in pink… This transient, spontaneous imagery embraces random occurrences beyond the filmmaker’s control. On the other hand, in an attempt to explore the relationship between film as an indexical medium of actuality and it as a creative treatment, she utilized language and interpretation of the imagery to experiment with fictional stories that resonate elements of the fantastical. A suicidal green apple; a world conditioned by the human sensory apparatus, but without humans; the complete history flashes through the mind of an old lady in an instant… These characters oscillate between different levels of reality, mediated through image and signs.
Tree begins when a protagonist awakens in a bush plane, mid-flight, disoriented, with no memory of who or where she is, seated beside a black dog. Tree constructs a temporal structure that is both circular and linear, where the memories of the future are inseparable with those of the past. The film follows the protagonist’s rational attempts to piece together her existence. She is thrown into a world where experience is already there. As she gazes out of her window at an abyss, a void that reflects nothing and offers no escape. In the spirit of filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky or Robert Beavers, the second half of the film consists of pure images in silence. This juxtaposition with the first half mirrors the protagonist's experience of being thrust into existence through a world devoid of sound or language.
Tirana 1973 is a film where the protagonist wakes up in Tirana in 1973 and faces a series of survival dilemmas and decisions. The film reconfigures archival propaganda footage from Albania’s communist regime alongside sequences from Mao’s China. The pictorial information is reiterated as a dilation of time, where an object such as a bottle of Maotai liquor becomes a thread connecting different times and spaces. With each return, the footage takes on a new function, at times presented as it is, at other times redirecting attention to a detail that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Her exhibition Twins, Twilight, and Apple Tree is relational in nature, resembling a role play language game composed of mundane, everyday materials and a series of minimalist paintings. Through reading the title cards, the audience is invited to interact, make choices or do nothing in the show.
At first glance, her paintings in Black Holes Collection seem easy to understand: drawings using a traditional technique from 2000 years ago, incorporating elements of science, cosmology, and narrative. However, It is through language that the meanings of pictorial dimensions find a different anchor. A horse in front of a portal, a black hole, with the title The Counterfactual Dependence Between a Man and a Horse, we see a fleeting sadness in the eyes of a horse, unsure of what is going on; something must be left unsaid. The painting is accompanied by the sentence: 'If you whip this horse, someone would lose their sanity; otherwise, the horse would remain in its place.' A causal chain is formed between the viewer, the horse, some man, and perhaps another character without identity. The disposition of the viewer is what completes the work-- a relationship was established despite leading to no empirical outcome.
Despite their apparent differences in form, all her works touch on the nature of individual existence, language, and knowledge in one way or another; within her worlds, banal everyday reality reveals a second, hidden nature.
She recently had solo shows: “Twins, Twilight, and Apple Tree”, “Moonlight of the Twins”, “Red or White Roses” and “Earth and Jerry”, and a two-person show: "Capital Investigation." Her works have also been shown at The Jewish Museum, Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), Lenfest Center for the Arts, Hudson River Museum, Microscope Gallery, among others. She had participated in performances at MoMA Ps1, Performa Biennial, Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT among others. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and has completed residencies at Art Explora × Vila 31 and Art Explora × Cité internationale des arts, fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, and ACRE. She was invited as a guest lecturer in the theoretical computer science department at Harvard University and has collaborated with scholars and researchers in different fields of science.