Ran Zhang is a contemporary artist based in Rotterdam and Berlin whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, print and photography. Zhang's practice involves a sustained study of the microscopic. It stems from her ongoing investigation into the tension between figure and pure form, revealing the invisible processes and structures surrounding us.
Read MoreBorn in Tianjin, China, in 1981, Zhang graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2010. She completed two artist residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2011 to 2013, where she began making two-dimensional works that transform the act of seeing into the subject. Works such as DIN AO (2013) take photographic enlargements of impasto paintwork, meandering pencil drawings, and mesh silkscreens to reveal the total flatness of the image, drawing awareness to 'the forgotten physicality of the image'.
Her 'Natritine Gaze' series of works (2014–15) are composed of up to 20,000 digital images—taken with a microscopic camera—of synthetic and natural materials the artist collected. Plastics, fibres, paper, sand, rubber, plants, and insects, among others, are viewed at 100 times magnification, resulting in alien substrates that obscure the original.
Similarly, the 'Chiral' series (2017–2020) comprises microscopically magnified photographs of miniature food platings—uncanny images that explore how desire is designed and exploited. The closeup images reveal unwanted elements, such as dust motes and microplastics, that induce horror at the excessive details of reality. Zhang goes further, puncturing the surface of the image with small holes that bring the viewer back to the surface of the image and its construction.
In 2019, Zhang began working on her 'Resolution of Traits' series (2019–2020), utilising scientific renderings of molecular protein structures. Motor protein strands—used to convert chemical potential into mechanical energy—visualised as vibrant, twisting colonies of DNA-like matter draw attention to the biochemical processes within our bodies that make perception possible. Zhang performs a self-reflexive gesture, situating the body in a unified relationship with the non-visible world, where the distinction between figurative and abstract becomes indistinct.
Ocula | 2020
