ZHANG MENG

I Lost Half My Soul Here ShanghART 5 September–31 October 2026 M50, Shanghai

Press Release

I Lost Half My Soul Here brings together highlights from various phases of Zhang Meng’s artistic practice over the past decade, with a particular focus on her recent expansion from drawings, artist books, sound, to textiles and other media. The exhibition title is drawn from a poem written by the artist ten years ago, reflecting on her experience of moving between different cities, languages, and cultural environments. Changes of place and shifts in familial and personal relationships shape the underlying structure of her lived experience; dreams and visceral feelings continue to unsettle established notions of time and space, allowing past events to assume new forms and iterations across different media.

Memory has long been a critical point of entry into Zhang Meng’s practice. Childhood experiences, chance encounters while living away from home, or sensations associated with a particular moment may re-emerge as the starting point for a work of art. Over time, different places, people, and experiences form new connections in her images, while specific details from these lived experiences reorganize themselves into more fluid spaces and narratives. Zhang repeatedly returns to certain experiences while accepting the ways in which life itself transforms memory. Her works thus contain an ever-shifting distance between the individual and the past, with each return opening onto freer relationships between space, scale, and narrative.

Zhang Meng’s 2025 residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands, marked an important turning point in her recent practice. There, she began working with hand weaving, machine weaving, and batik. Lines that had filled her drawings began to move beyond the surface of paper and into the physical structures of wool, cotton, linen, and other fabrics. Weaving extended the duration of making, while the thickness, colour, texture, and density of the threads became active elements in the formation of each work. Machine weaving introduced further processes of design translation, technical support, and specialised knowledge from others, allowing images to undergo transformations between different technologies and materials. At the same time, the life and surroundings of the residency entered her works on paper, giving the immediacy of the present an increasingly distinct place in her practice.

The development of Zhang Meng’s recent work can be traced through her earlier practice. Sleeping Dress stitches her diary entries into an intimate garment; Address Book and Das Absage Buch turn letters, text, and sound into material traces of personal history; while A Salvation of the Fat from My Kindergarten Lunch Box, rooted in childhood experience, has undergone multiple transformations over the years through drawing, textiles, artist’s books, and other media. Her recent hand-woven and machine-woven works continue to explore how experience takes on material form. Lines from her drawings become the warp and weft, interwoven and suspended, while personal memories enter a creative process shaped collectively through material, technique, and collaboration.

Touch, text, sound, and space give Zhang’s personal experience an increasingly complex material structure.