Connie Zheng

Artist Statement

I am a Chinese-American artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker. For the past seven years, I’ve been moving between drawing, text, installation and time-based practices to examine the interplays of diasporic memory, culture and environmental history. Since 2021, I have been making wall-sized map drawings as a method for inviting audiences to re-orient to our surroundings — especially places we consider ‘home’ — in productively alien ways, by combining narratives of the land that are sometimes buried or marginalized. My works are grounded in a diasporic sense of belonging, an awe for the multiplicity of place, and an attunement to the intersections of personal narrative, communal histories, and land use. Collage is my primary aesthetic strategy: I see my maps as collages of public and private knowledge; my films as containers for collaging time, voice and narrative; and my sound work as collages of sonic encounters between my body and its surroundings.

Guest Passage, 2023. 12-channel sound installation with video projection. Installed for the Bay Area Now 9 Triennial at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Photography by Jenna Garrett

Bio

Connie Zheng was born in north-central China and is based out of Northern California, on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people. Her projects have been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and the Esker Foundation (Calgary, Canada). Her work is held in the permanent collections of KADIST and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, among other organizations, and recent press of her work includes coverage in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and MUBI Notebook. Her publications include a chapter in the “Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change”, as well as essays in Small Press Traffic and Errant Journal. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

https://www.conniezheng.com/