Vivien Zhang studio visit

Vivien Zhang | b 1990 China, based in London

2014 MA in Painting, Royal College of Art, London

2012 BA in Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London

Why did you decide to base your practice in the UK?

I am from Beijing, China. Growing up I moved around a lot with my mum – to Kenya and Thailand – until I came to do university in London. And it’s here where I finally felt I have found my own network (and some stability), and for the first time a sense of my own direction. I have been in the UK for nearly 12 years now. It is nice to have a base, and with work I travel quite a bit. From London you can hop over very easily to Paris, Rome, Berlin and such. I work with Long March Space in Beijing so I also go back to China about two times a year.

Have you always been interested in art and creativity?

When I was a kid, I just really loved drawing. Early on the people around me have definitely played a role in how confident I was to commit to art. In school, art was also the one subject that I had enough patience with and dedicated time to. With other subjects I was satisfied with a good grade, but with art I always put in the extra effort and totally would be annoyed if the teacher didn’t give me enough attention.

If you were to describe your practice to someone who didn’t know you, what would you say?

The shortest answer I have ever given is that I do painting, abstract, with a lot of repetition and context-specific motifs.

Then the slightly longer answer might be that I use layers to challenge space, the definition of painting, and what a landscape for a new generation of digital natives or third-culture citizens could be. I build my own ecology of motifs and draw references from this “collection” when I’m making work.

“Out of their original contexts’ objects might mean something completely different, people don’t recognise them anymore and I like that possibility”

— Vivien Zhang

Do you have any obsessions or rituals that triggers a state of flow?

I find it helpful to mix my colours the day before so that the next day I can just get started with working. I guess the only real obsession I have is cleaning my brushes, I take about half an hour at the end of each day for this. I buy really nice sable brushes and they have to be kept in shape.

What you are working on at the moment?

I’m working on a few things, one of which is the install of my work in a group show, opening in a private museum, Wanying Art Museum in China. This show was delayed due to Covid but hopefully will open next month.

I’m also starting to prepare for a solo show coming up next year, but it’s been a bit hard to focus #workingfromhome and to keep up the momentum. So at home I was doing more peripheral work around the show planning, really, like exhibition mockups. I’m finally back in the studio now, so hopefully the rhythm will pick up.

Cult, Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas, 51 x 46 cm

How are you managing to maintain your practice during this strange time?

I had set myself a goal for “working from home”, to make a series of small canvases which are no more than 35cm. I wanted them to be loose, fluid, unsystematic, and explore some of the less tangible ideas I’ve been curious about but haven’t had a chance to delve into. I’m finishing a few books I had open and to catch up on a couple of essays. In essence I’m seeing this slowed phase as a great chance to recalibrate. Though it’s not necessarily productive, and some days do melt into other days. I’m writing a piece about unproductivity as well, reflecting on this strange time, how we’re really living in the “present” – living on a day-to-day basis, how things can change at any moment, and how the “future” is less relevant at this point in time.

What myths do you think there are about the art world?

That artists do not schedule their time and are unstructured and non-committal. I think the root to being successful is being disciplined, focused, driven; artists work extremely hard to produce their work. Making a work of art is not whimsical.

The other myth is that the art world is all glam and beautiful. There’s so much blood and sweat behind everything, and the pivotal game-changing movements don’t come from glistening exhibition halls.

Vivien Zhang. Exhibition 2020 credit Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai

Vivien Zhang. Solo Exhibition (2018). credit Long March Space, Beijing

What were the main lessons you learned at Art School?

At Slade a tutor told me that erasing can be as important as adding to a painting. As soon as you add something to a blank canvas it changes the space in the painting, but erasing it also affects the space. I really loved this idea. It’s like Tanizaki’s novel In Praise of Shadows which I was reading at the time as well. So from then on I started thinking about the idea of reduction quite a lot in my work, in terms of efficiency and precision – I often go back to “clean” and reshape marks I’ve made.

Then at the Royal College of Art (RCA) a tutor advised me, at a time when we were facing the prospect of graduating and being dropped into the real world, that as a young artist you can be choosy. I had imagined the opposite – that one should take all the opportunities that came in their way. Having this piece of advise at the back of my mind just helped me filter out a lot of the unnecessary things.

How valuable were your tutors?

Extremely. A few examples: my personal tutor from the Slade was the head of undergraduate studies, Andrew Stahl, I am still in touch with him now. He has a big personality and was an incredible source of encouragement.

At the RCA, the humanities tutor Jonathan Miles opened up the world of art theory and criticism for me. I had found writings in this subject very intimidating before, but Jonathan introduced me to texts that were easy to absorb at first, and over time led me to comfortably engage with other texts.

And in my final year at the RCA I requested if a tutor, John Strutton, could supervise me, because of his sharpness and also precisely because his practice was so different from mine. That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. He didn’t always agree with me and constantly challenged me. Those were tremendously valuable exercises one can get as a student. I could go on with names but I’d take up this whole interview.

Talk to me about your routine as an artist.

My routine is always the best when I come back from travels, because I’m jet-lagged, so I get to wake up super early and come in. Usually though, I try to come in before 11 and then stay until late. I like the quietness of the evening hours to work, and at the moment my partner lives away during weekdays so I am taking advantage of this. Before going in to the studio I usually make a short list of things I want to get done that day. These solid goals would get the rhythm flowing, then I try to work around other tasks.

I do work until a lot later if there was an exhibition coming up. I could work until 2 or 3 am, or at times till the break of dawn and I get the bus home with the first cohort of workers going into town, many dozing off in their seats. It can get quite mad and unhealthy.

Tell me about how you use layers and space in your work?

I find we are intrinsically effected by user-interface designs from our smartphones, the softwares we use, etc. Our ways of reading information today has been moulded by the layers and designs of such technologies. This is very much on my mind when I’m making work and is translated in the paintings – both consciously and subconsciously. I grew up using Photoshop extensively since the age of 11 or so, being the chief editor of my middle school yearbook. So in my work some of the layers emulate how I have come to understand space through the “conditioning” from such software.

Then to think about space, before Picasso was challenging space or Futurists with their angles and shadows, there has always been different notions of space and perspective – I’m thinking about the diffused perspective in traditional Chinese ink painting and Carlo Crivelli’s embossing technique mixed in his oil painting. Space has again changed today because of our over-reliance on the fluid colours of illuminated screens, AR, and AI (which calculates data on hundreds of dimensions more than our three-dimensional world). So I want to figure out these possible spaces through my work – the positive and negative, the flat and the curved, the merging and the rugged.

My work can seem digitally rendered, but when one sees the physical paintings they would realise there are lots of imperfections, smudges, and “mistakes”. I guess I’m trying to contend digital and virtual spaces we live in today, by allowing or inducing these human irregularities.

How do you see art’s function within society?

I think art can be a gentler communicator of things. When it comes to a violent debate or protest, I think art can be an eye opener and deliver messages in a softer voice. Forensic Architecture, for example, is a great example of this. Their works deliver powerful messages in ways that are not akin to the usual, heavy news outlet.

I also feel art is a good medium to show that most things are not black and white. Art being a medium that is not definite, finite, or conclusive, can help people do a double-take on many things. So it can be an effective medium for displaying research that is still coming to a conclusion, delivering ongoing queries and non-conclusive discoveries in a constructive way. A lot of artwork are not messages but questions.

What books do you recommend to people?

I just picked up Educated by Tara Westover and I cannot put the book down! Perhaps it’s because we’re in the middle of a pandemic and the memoir starts with her childhood talking about her prepper father and how they were trained in survivalism.

The other book I’ve recommended several times recently is New Dark Age by James Bridle. It’s one of the top books on my list at the moment. Bridle portrays a great history of our technology and also the unseen, unrecognised disastrous potential of our technological progression. He outlines super fascinating case studies about the hidden dangers of technology, if we turn a blind eye to them, ranging from incidents caused by GPS over-reliance to NHS hospital rooftops being used as financial trading platforms. Most interestingly, I think, are his chapters on the limitations of AI and our relationship to it.