Zhihui Zhang (China)

The backyard showcases an assemblage of Zhihui’s MFA degree show experiments created during Covid-19 quarantine about operating the kinetic imagery between two-and three-dimensional space, which respond to the specific site, the backyard of her house shared with her roommates. This showcase also including BBQ and Karaoke as the after-party events. Deeply triggered by kinetic imagery and motions from everyday experience, Zhihui brings the articles of daily use into her recent imagery experiment: hanging the towel with the pattern of the gibbon hanging on the tree on the washing line, projecting the image of a monkey crouching scrupulously on the top of the stump onto the surface of a paper cup putting on top of the baluster column, displaying the image of the koala embracing the tree on the iPhone put it in the sports arm holder and invite people to wear it on, “hacking” a CD-ROM to make it constantly ejecting and inserting a disc printed the image of the tongue on the surface, treating a piece of paper with the image of the hare as a piece of toastie popping up and staying down in the toaster, reinterpreting the movement of walking the dog through Javascript and several monitors… ​ As the artist encountered with more and more ‘daily wonders’, the artist began to think about what it is exactly that attracted her in those found scene, and she wanted to “concretize” the dynamic “posture” (kinetic imagery) caused by the physical movements in those everyday scenes by manipulation the material image. please visit my backyard showcase online:

https://www.zhihuizhang.org/sw19-2eu

This piece was created when I was quarantined in the hotel in Shanghai after returning from London. When you look down at the space you have been in for a long time; your room, your studio, any field that carries the trajectory of your daily routine, you will often find a patch of hair. Then, as you walk through the space, you’ll notice that the hairs are clustered in some places, only a few in some places, and none at all, forming a distribution diagram of the physical space you exist in.

I, born in the 1990s, have already lost interest in TV shows. My daily work is “materialized” in the virtual space of laptops and mobile phone terminals. The ‘History’ of the web browser, the charting software’s ‘Recently opened file’ records the websites and documents -places- I’ve visited, but in which way I could show my paths -footprints- ,which are more subtle than the ‘spots’? Through p5.js programming, I randomly generated various forms of Bezier curve hair, and correlated the generation time and direction of the curve with the speed and the position of the cursor. The user could experience how they leaves a browsing track in the form of hair loss when they visits the web pages.

It is worth mentioning that the hair generated in the web page is not derived from the PNG image of real hair, but the pixel curve graph generated by the computer programming algorithm. Please fall the hair here: https://www.zhihuizhang.org/falling-hairs