Lian Zhang

Through painted biomorphic, mutated beings and surreal settings, Lian Zhang deals with the experience of displacement from her home in China. Immigrating to the United Kingdom at a young age, Zhang’s work incorporates elements of both Chinese and British culture and history, refiguring the unfamiliarity and strangeness of her new environment. Her figures often bear the faces of people transposed onto animals or objects; at other times, figures lose limbs, only to gain new ones elsewhere, signifying the transaction of immigration. Zhang’s work also tackles the encounter between bodies and nature, placing people apparrelled in traditional Chinese clothing within the English pastoral, and often morphing them with foliage, animals, and the landscape.

Lian Zhang was born in 1984, Hangzhou, China. She studied for an MA in Painting at the China Academy of Art between 2007 and 2010, before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2013. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in London, Los Angeles, and China. In 2013, Zhang won the Hine Painting Prize, and in the same year was shortlisted for the Valerie Beston Award. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Curator’s Prize The Open West. Zhang lives and works between London and Hangzhou.