Liangxu Zhang

Liangxu Zhang (1997) is a Visual Communicator based in UK and China. Before studying MA Visual Communication at RCA, she completed her BA degree in Graphic Design at Winchester School of Art.

Liangxu is a multi-disciplinary designer with an experimental practice in strategies of Graphic Design, Editorial Design, Illustration, Installation, Photography, Writing, Drawing and Motion Graphic.

2018 - Selected Awards, Platinum Arts Creative International Student Graphic Design Competition

2018 – Currency Design Speech, De La Rue, Basingstoke, UK.

2021 – The Condensation of a Cloud Exhibition, Hoxton Gallery, London

Who am I on the 15th of June 2022

I am in London. I study Experimental Communication. I see my experimental process as my outcome. I like embodied experiences. But I Don’t Like Walking!

I was born in North East China. It is a very cold place (-23 °C). I draw connections between regional and localised experience. I build connections with my audience. NOW. I locate myself in different sites of London as a way of responding to my cultural background.

I SEE MYSELF AS A HACKER. As a hacker I: Don’t like walking. Was born in the millennial generation. Believe in Wark’s Capital is Dead. Lives in a data-obsessed society. Dominated by who owns and controls the information. Understand behaviours in Haraway’s Chuthulecene. Reconfigure human relationship with landscape. Requires sym-poiesis with technology. Embrace technology, fantasise to live in a techno-utopian world. Call for provocative ways of seeing how landscape can be transformed as information.

IN THIS PROJECT, I locate myself back in my hometown. Google maps is my transportation. I am like a hacker exploring my hometown’s landscape. I am like a hacker roaming there. I am like a hacker memorising there. Question how to negotiate human relationships with body, landscape, and technology in the context of a digital culture and a global pandemic. Use speculation to invoke questions about the phenomenon of contemporary society instead of giving answers. Combine existing technologies (Google Maps) to offer more possibilities of con-evolution with human-behaviour and landscape.

Installation Image I

Installation Image II

A still image from the documentation of the performance I

A still image from the documentation of the performance II

Launch Project

My Place in a Non-place Series

My Place in a Non-place Series is a multi-disciplinary work, which includes installation, performance, and video. This project illustrates a hacker who uses Google Maps to transform the body in her hometown (North East China) through three different spaces: anthropological place, meta-space, and non-place. The installation is shown as a non-place format via printing google maps. The performance was formed with two parts: 1. Read five concrete poetry stories to show the outer brain in meta-space. 2. Body movement to show the memory of each place. The performance and video are divided in five series which connect to five anthropological places (Abandoned residence, Primary school, Middle school, High school, and train station) which articulate this hacker’s cultural background and identity. The video shows the documentation of the performance and entwines the audience into a journey through being unfamiliar with the non-places to build emotional connections with the anthropological places. The aim of this project is using a critical perspective to present the current situation of co-evolution with the media in a data-obsessed society, and reflect how contemporary human’s daily life is all watched over by machines of loving grace in a cybernetic ecology.

Medium:

Mixed Media

Exhibition Image I

Exhibition Image II

Exhibition Image III

Tracing Robot

A Part of Documentation of Exhibition

Guide: PHGR+2M – Audio Walks

Guide: PHGR+2M is an interactive installation design which illustrates an anonymous hacker roaming on a cybernetic hometown landscape on Google Maps, investigating how Humans are increasingly reliant on cyberspace for their social activities and attributes. Site-specific writing is used as a design method, transforming the writing into an audio and interactive installation to entwine the audience in a narrative that shifts through time and space in the hacker's hometown (North East China).

Medium:

Mixed Media

Size:

2m x 2m

Liangxu Zhang

Who am I on the 15th of June 2022

Medium:

Medium:

Size:

Social

About

Royal College of Art