Zheng (Moham) Wang （mohamstudio.com）
Born on February 20, 1996, in Guilin, Guangxi, Zheng (Moham) Wang grew up in Wuhan, Hubei, and now lives and works in Singapore and San Francisco. He is a artist, curator, writer of Mien ethnic-minority background.
He graduated from Rice University in the United States in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree double-majoring in Art History and Visual and Dramatic Arts (Studio Art).
He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 2022 with a Master of Arts degree and received the Lillian Disney Scholarship (USD 30,000).
He is currently a PhD Student in art history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and has received a full academic research scholarship (NTU Research Fellowship).
In 2019, he was the first intern of mainland Chinese background to be in the Exhibition department of the SFMoMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) Museum in San Francisco, California, and was selected for sponsorship by the Bank of America Stipend-ship;
In 2021, he was selected for the Shenzhen KONGLAB ‘UFO Curator’ program, and cooperated with Xiamen Nordic Contemporary Art Center and Chengdu ‘Notice’ space for first traveling exhibition “Photosynthesis”.
In 2021, he was selected for the Poetry Residency of the Accent Society in New York and the One Hundred Rivers Return to the Sea International Artist Residency Program of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.
He was shortlisted for the 2022 Jimei · Arles Video Curator Award.
His academic works can be found in the Aesthetic Education journal of China People’s Fine Arts Publishing House and User Experience & Urban Creativity of the University of Lisbon Press, Portugal; poetry, novel, prose, and criticism works can be found in Youth, Qingdao Literature, Young Writers, Taiwan’s China Daily, Vineyard, Taike, Wild Gingerlily, RaPoetry poetry magazines, and Wenhsun magazine; Hong Kong’s Sound and Rhyme Poetry Magazine, P-Article, and Hong Kong Literary; paintings and installation works can be seen in Rice Magazine in Houston, the United States, Archlove magazine, Sine Theta magazine in Italy, M.A.D.S. Gallery in Milan and other exhibitions.
In 2020, his poem Mien Folk Song was selected to be in the 2020 Taiwan Literature Yearbook.
In 2021, his painting Somnium Sinica won the second prize of the Texas Art Alliance.
In 2022, his master’s thesis was selected for the City and Art Forum at Aarhus University, Denmark.
In 2020, his multilingual artist-poetry anthology Mountain Rock was published by Cite E-Printing Co., Ltd.
His poetry drama work Baiyue: Theater of Diaspora was selected for the Edinburgh International Poetry Festival in the UK in 2022.
His prose-poem Evening at the Fishing Port in 2023 was selected for the 2023 Beijing International Poetry Festival.
In 2023, his co-authored paper Sound Art Archives in the Metaverse was selected for the ISEA Electronic Arts Forum in Paris, France.
His fiction Tobacco, Sake, and Lizzard Town won the Fourth Luoye Literature Award in Taiwan.
His poem Crescent Hall won the Fifth Xinhua Youth Literature Award in Singapore.
His curatorial proposal We Are Light Won the Excellence Award of the Second Global College Student Competition on Curating Virtual Exhibitions 2023.
Artist Statement
The discussion on individual psychologicy and its connection with psychology space and the physical world are important to the past two years of my practice. I am trying to figure out the existence of imagery in connection with unconscious psychological motivations, trying to figure how imagery appears from this connection in a feedback loop with the physical world.
The inspiration of catching unconscious imagery comes from a desire for talking and expressing after a long time of personal isolation. This isolation has not only been spatial but also cultural. In the past two years, I lived in China and Italy and these two countries both made me feel out of place.
In the silent COVID years in China, my practice was stopped due to reasons including miscommunication as well as space limits and time difference. My mind was isolated. But when I went to Italy and participated in studio art again, the cultural differences and extremly unknown surroudings also made me feel that I couldn’t locate myself.
The constant pains of loss and isolation produced a desire for shouting and reconstructing a connection to my surroundings, especially at the moment when I had strong and uncontrollable psychologial impulses, so that I found myself able to capture these strongest impulses in paint.
I allowed myself to pour out all my emotions, to expose how I had come undone, as the unpredicaticable brushstrokes occurred upon the painted surface. The whole process was illogical and natrually directed by my body, giving the paintings a sense of being free and relaxed. At the same time, I accepted and used the natural textures of the painting materials, such as the wrinkles on the canvas and the damaged brushes. These material features were involved as parts of the paintings and provided an additional layer of documentation to the action of art creation.
Mountain Rock
Mountain Rock
Book (Artist book with written poems
and self-illustrated images)
300 pages, 2022.
Piece Description
Text: Wang Zheng
“In retrospect, it is not a singular time or space, but a plural spatiality that can account for my cultural identity, which is crucial to my art practice.
The physical geography of mountains and cities, the cultural geography of language, knowledge, and education, and the affective geography of a changing self, all come to form my affective field of being and inform my practice in turn.
As the British scholar Stuart Hall indicates, the Diasporic self is always in a state of ‘becoming,’ and is a product of interactions. My latest work, Mountain Rock presented in this exhibition showcases the mechanism of these interactions and how each of the geographical dimensions unfolds and transforms the discrete trails of affect into a reflective network of experiences.
I sincerely hope that my work will act as a roadmap for audiences to navigate the complexities of their lives and hereby find a sense of strength and freedom in reconnecting with the post-pandemic world.”
-Excerpt from Wang Zheng’s writings on how artworks, in this exhibition relate to Geographies of Feeling
Baiyue: Theater of Diaspora
Baiyue: Theatre of Diaspora
Wang Zheng, Video, 20’29”, 2022.
Please contact us if you want to watch the video of the artwork
info@yanluartsandculture.com
Piece Description
Artist He Gong and Dr. Sophia Kidd invited me to join this exhibition, Geographies of Feeling in the spring of 2023, a period the world is just emerging out of the lingering Pandemic, and a unique moment for rebirth and recollection.
I finished the publication of my first artist poetry album Mountain Rock and was living alone in Singapore to complete the first year of my Ph.D. in Art, Design, and Media with a newly acquired specialization in Chinese media art and body politics.
It was a new phase for me and I realized also, a new phase for Chinese art to be recounted with alternative methods and feelings.
Although I was immediately intrigued by the title of the exhibition ‘Geographies of Feeling,’ I have never seriously considered myself part of the great edifice of Chinese contemporary art. Having been a diasporic individual to China, to my ethnic group of the Mien, and now to the West (in Singapore), I see myself more as an ‘outsider’ in the sense of Meursault to his world in The Stranger.
Similarly, I adopted a geographical approach to writing Mountain Rock as a perceptive journal of my diasporic journey since my birth and other visual works including those, I created during an art residency I participated in in Chongqing during the subtropical summer of 2021. The title feels only too personal.
The physical geography of mountains and cities, the cultural geography of language, knowledge, and education, and the affective geography of a changing self, all come to form my affective field of being and inform my practice in turn.
As the British scholar Stuart Hall indicates, the diasporic self is always in a state of ‘becoming,’ and is a product of interactions. My latest work, Mountain Rock soon to be presented in the exhibition showcases the mechanism of these interactions and how each of the geographical dimensions unfolds and transforms the discrete trails of affect into a reflective network of experiences.
I sincerely hope that my work will act as a roadmap for audiences to navigate complexities in their lives and hereby find a sense of strength and freedom in reconnecting with the post-pandemic world.
-Zheng (Moham) Wang, Fremont 2023
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