With a conceptual approach, Chinese-born and Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist Zhang Mengjiao, aka Jasmine Zhang’s work investigates social issues of “immigration” and explores questions pertinent to the autonomy behind being a woman of color, Chinese, artist and human being. Her socially engaged art takes the form of photography, texts, painting, performance video, and sculptural installations. Her first solo show entitled “For the Sake of… the Artifice!”, takes place in Los Angeles at the Kylin Gallery (8634 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA, 90211) from June 19th-July 3rd, and she will then go on to host an exhibition in San Francisco shortly afterwards.
We would love to set up an interview with Zhang Mengjiao to discuss her upcoming art exhibition and her work as an artist.
Whitney, Caitlin & Morgan
Brought up and educated by Chinese traditional value systems where each individual is accountable for the prosperity and adversity of the world, she feels obliged to make community-based engagement activities and artwork to empower not only herself. While conceptualizing to work with a community, she rethinks how to enter the community from an artist vantage. What role should the organization take, and what kind of reciprocal exchange system should she build in between herself and the community. In order to support her community, she strives to create a new narrative that contains a reciprocal exchange system. Through this system, she is determined to challenge the white supremacy and American gaze that has oppressed her as a woman of color, a non-citizen, and a human being.
We would love to set up an interview with Zhang Mengjiao to discuss her upcoming art exhibition and her work as an artist.
Whitney, Caitlin & Morgan
With a conceptual approach, Zhang Mengjiao tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.
Her works never show the complete structure. This results in the fact that the artist can easily imagine an own interpretation without being hindered by the historical reality. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, she makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. The work tries to express this with the help of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor.
Her works are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages and situations as well as depictions and ideas that can only be realized in photography.
Her works directly respond to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.
Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By examining the ambiguity and origination via retakes and variations, she presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed.
