RAN ZHANG

In Dark Romance, Ran Zhang explores the connection between biological knowledge and personal experience, tracing how it moves beyond academic frameworks to permeate times of crisis or transformation in daily life. This interplay examines the sensory dissonance between what we know and what we feel — between the embodiment of knowledge and the personalization of science. Ran Zhang reimagines biological knowledge not as a fixed truth but as a mirror reflecting our complexities towards a form of romance — one that is rational yet emotional, universal yet intimate. By uncovering how crises destabilize and mutate scientific understanding, knowledge becomes less a doctrine and more a driving force.

The exhibition presents her new series of “two-dimensional sculptures”, textured with dense organic micrographs and fragmented motifs of eye floaters, motor and visual proteins. These works create a tension between sensory experiences and scientific data, blurring the lines between symbols and patterns. They fracture functional scientific visualizations, blending biology, storytelling, and fiction into a hybrid form. Each object becomes a living entity, brimming with visual details that conjure a fictional personality and an imagined past. They cluster in various groups, forming autocatalytic relationships.
Dark Romance unravels how knowing, obsession, fantasy, and horror bleed into one another, morphing and feeding off each other in an evolving cycle.

Since 2018, Zhang has developed her eye floater motifs as an exploration of incremental change. She created the first generation by observing her own eye floaters through a microscope, noting how they merged with her subjects and caused distortion. Over time, each floater evolved into new configurations, adapting to its environment. These floaters are both biological debris and artistic material; their worm-like distortions become collaborators, merging scientific observation with bodily precarity. Their shifting size, thickness, and traits reflect a Darwinian pragmatism, adapting to the evolving ecosystem of her practice.

By forcing a laser cutter to produce primal appearances through blurry lines and mistakes instead of precise cuts, Zhang subverts the machine’s intended purpose, making it act like a prehistorical machine that never existed. This act of exorcising industrial logic introduces a human element, blending the mechanical with the organic. Just as her eye floaters disrupted her biological vision, the sabotaged laser cutter embodies a unique type of visual vulnerability. These mechanical failures evoke a bodily love story, bridging the biochemical and mechanical to foster a unified sense of a hyper-self.

The exhibition features a short story authored by Zhang, presented as a fictional transcript of a conversation among nine alien creatures, the artist herself, and two human collaborators, writer/editor Estelle Hoy and writer/curator Mihnea Mircan. As the dialogue unfolds, description becomes a vital force, driving the protagonists to theorize an autocatalytic reality. Within this speculative framework, the alien entities emerge as self-aware atomic fragments of a visual G protein-coupled receptor.

Berlin-based DJ and sound researcher Diamin, together with plastic and sound artist Sean Gates, created the sound piece played in the exhibition space. Their 25-minute sound design incorporates recorded sounds from the exhibition’s creation process—such as laser cutters and tools—with sound entities crafted from encounters with Zhang’s works. The piece functions as an auditory archive, blending biological rhythms and systematic patterns. The sound installation is played at two volumes: a lower volume assigned to a single work locally and a louder volume in the upstairs space, layering the exhibition with both microscopic and macroscopic narrative textures.

Ran Zhang, born 1981, Tianjin, China, lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Berlin, Germany.She was selected twice for the artist residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2011 to 2013. In 2008, Zhang received the Gold and Bronze Prizes from the Danfoss Art Award. In 2014, she was awarded the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst Ontwikkelbudget and the Mondriaan Fonds Werkbijdrage Jong Talent.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Jiggly Motions, FRAC Occitanie Montpellier (2022); Enantiomers and traces, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2021); Resolution of Traits, L’ahah, Paris (2021); Natritine Gaze 2, M4 Gastatelier, Amsterdam (2016). Recent group exhibitions include: Am Seegarten, Kirchmöser, Brandeburg (2023); Atlas of Affinities: Vol. 2, Scores for Movement, HUA International, Berlin (2023); Aliens are temporary – eine mutierende Erzählung, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2022); Convidados, Galería Vilaseco, A Coruña (2022); WIE ES EUCH GEFÄLLT UND WAS WIR SIND, Knust Kunz, Munich (2021); Werethings, Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2019); Home Sequence, Amsterdam (2019); The Hazenstraat Biennale, Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam (2018); I Ikigai, Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam (2017); My Respects to Madame Bernard, Momart, Amsterdam (2015); Double Vision-Culture China, Hexiangning Museum, Shengzhen (2014).