Ang Ziqi Zhang

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Over the past several years, my painting practice has engaged broadly with ideas around desire, embodied time, and magical Taoist thought. My paintings often begin with legible words, images, and symbols from didactic sources like diagrams, illustrations, and signage. I employ different modes of touch to modulate these images beyond recognition. These tactics include screen printing, warping and distorting images, drawing, and repeatedly rubbing and erasing paint. I loop, convolute, touch, and obfuscate until the paintings attain a reverberant, palimpsest-like quality. My goal as a painter is to destabilize and un-fix legibility, undermine usefulness, and question meaning in our current historical moment. The process I have developed over the past decade feels more central to my painting practice than the images or words I take as starting points for the works. I almost never plan for an end image or result, and the paintings almost always depart from their original sources. Each layer at some point spins out, bumps up against the next, covers up. For me, this process is how I attempt to seek out meaning as an artist—part associative thinking, part rule breaking. I have found deep resonances with different “technologies” from ancient times—writing, image making, and timekeeping being foundational ones. Recently, I have felt especially inspired by the ancient Chinese linguistic practice of Taoist fulu calligraphy. The images of fulu talismans are written ceremoniously by...

Artwork