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#About

Yuqiao Zhang (she/her) explores the immanence of photography through interdisciplinary approaches, including sound installation and writing, which involves illumination, duration, rhythm, and other embodied experiences. Two curiosities are interconnected in this medium: the boundary where photographs can speak or remain silent; and how photography, as its nonfunctional self, participates in her life and shared field of human activities. Before gaining an MFA from CalArts, she majored in Communication Studies and trained in China’s Physics Contest, where her fascination with microsociology and potential energy now echoes through her photo philosophy. 

She investigates the politics of luck and engages belief as both a criticized ideological mechanism that upholds the sacred authority of certain systems, images, or discourses, yet as an implicity of its subverted potential - one shadows, misuses, or remakes on one’s own terms.  Her photographs operate in such a space between devotional and profaning: they imitate transcendent moments as incarnation rather than representation, and reflect what memory excludes. The refusal of its status being identified in reality, relies on the object’s flexibility in redefinition, re-form, and distortion from its etiquette. Influenced by her early communal ritual experiences, people-oriented value, and Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy, her practice considers profanation a disarming reverence that restores humans’ access with a kind of intimacy to what is treated as untouchable.  

She is the recipient of the Dee Williams Memorial Travel Grant, the Interdisciplinary Grant, and the Bartman Fund. Her shows include solo show Parodic Soliloquy I, Kill the Immortals, How Can I Cure You, in This Circualtion? and several group shows in Los Angeles.  

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