Yilin Zhang(b.1998)
Bio
Yilin Zhang (b. 1998, China) lives and works between Shanghai, London, and Athens, Georgia. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Art at the University of Georgia, after receiving her MA from the Royal College of Art and her BA from the China Academy of Art. Centered on painting, her practice also spans printmaking, installation, performance, and writing. Shaped by her cross-cultural experiences across China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, her work explores mysticism, trauma, mythology, monstrosity, supernatural phenomena, and science fiction through a comparative and intuitive lens. Her practice attends to the trauma and subjective experiences of the Other, engaging spirituality, irrationality, and perception as strategies for ongoing healing and re-enchantment.
In her recent series Fairy Child, Wild Rain (仙童乱雨) , she draws inspiration from Ming-Qing Chinese ghost and romance literature alongside New Weird fiction to explore the entangled relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. In her practice, innocence (纯情) is conceived as an experience of body horror. Writing and painting are woven together, spilling across one another through embodied, cross-media practices. Through body-mediated abstract paintings made with pastel and mixed media, ghostly beauty and seductive illusions begin to emerge across these imagined landscapes. Across these intertwined forms, she explores how qing (情)—a distinctly non-Western mode of affect emerges as an entangled, possessing, and incantatory force that inhabits worlds.
