Lianhua Zhang (Lian) b.2000 was born in Shenzhen, China.
She completed her BA at Beijing Film Academy_MCMC with Photography major; MA at the Royal College of Art.
Her work focuses on memory, identity and experiences through photography, moving images and documentaries, which explore the tragedies and absurdities of contemporary society. She also writes imaginary stories through poetic texts, drawing from her personal life.
「I’m always exploring themes related to memory, emotional projection and collective forgetting of people in a digital context, wandering between different mediums.
I am thinking about how contemporary practice, if placed in the future, becomes the past, becomes history, and how our present memories will be stored in the future, in the cloud, on tapes, or on letters, etc. When we see the huge database in the future, will we lose our sense of direction? Which memory is the most important? Will its importance be perpetuated? What kind of memory will be erased from history again? Will it continue to maintain its objective documentary nature? Or do we still need this documentary nature?
I have found that defining one's identity depends largely on memory, but often there is a misalignment of consciousness that turns memory into a lie, and over time our consciousness gradually becomes a water balloon of mixed fiction and reality, an immune system of fictitious emotions.
I have been influenced by different regions and cultures, making my perception chronically clouded with an unrecognizable layer of transient alertness to things. My film is then a mixture of reality, memory and imagination, a poetic and personal reflection.
Through the arrangement and rearrangement of objects, things and people gradually lose their original functions and identities, filled with a quiet yet uneasy feeling, the absence of experience and the dislocation of discourse, and the blurring of their own positioning. At the same time, in the abstract forms and low-saturated color environment, emotions become malleable. Thinking about a coexistence about fragility yet resilience.」
This is two channels film work from different media, which is played in LCD & CRT at the same time.
「The starting point of DISSONANCE is from a game of five stones, I used to play with my peers in my childhood. Under the rules of competition, I had to throw one stone while picking up the remaining stones in order of number, without allowing them to fall in between, and finally winning if I could hold all five stones in my hands.」
So I created five incomplete poetic notes that correspond to it, interpreting through the images I construct the material reflections and an emotion of conflict with social norms brought about by the deviations of behaviour and rules that arise during the game. As we are confined to the various rules of contemporary society, I am like a stone, the purpose and function of the stones is blurred, an implied vulnerability and deprived functionality is recalled, dismantlement, reconstruction and repetition.
「Most of the images come from everyday life, which has a certain rhythm and regularity that is as much bound to me as the obsession with the game. Through the arrangement and rearrangement of objects, things and people also gradually lose their original function and identity, and also gradually feel blurred. This film is not in search of a result, it is a process of constantly testing itself.」
「My text is drawn from the diary my father kept, which recorded his feelings about his environment during his teenage years, but I was inspired when I saw the diary he wrote, and I felt that although we grew up in different times, we received similar strictures. I extracted the parts that resonated with my memory and combined them with the fragmented language in my mind. At the same time I have worked on the format and texture of the film, a kind of reflection on the material dimension, a locking of the flow of time and images.」
Exploring the hybridity of personal identity, memory, experience, creating my own narrative and imagination of the story, thinking about how the emotional experience of loss reacts to the long-standing social dynamics and how I should balance this hybridity and fluidity. How do I break through individual limitations when we are confronted with our inherent futility and tragedy? I try to answer with my own experiences and different film textures.
The body is controlled, the mind cries out, wanders. When information reaches a certain level, I try to read the rules, a process of playing with contemporary society, many times unconsciously, and constructing new spatial relationships. The Telephone index and the metal objects between the two channels are an interpretation of this.
The juxtaposition of the two channels and the physical things installation, which is different frequencies on the same track. A place is quietly changing, when your eyes are not looking at it. As the film ends, Unaware and hindsight.
