Ana Ziqi Zhang work across different modes of painting, design, DJ-ing, and event hosting to investigate intersections between affect, semiotics, and the conditions of late capitalism. In their paintings, visual play and gestural improvisation serve as metonym for navigating and making sense of the structures that prop up our worlds. They take seemingly neutral images and symbols such as signage, diagrams, and graphical representations as starting points for this painterly modulation and association. These modulations occur through varied modes of mark-making including gesture, obfuscation, and the slow accumulation of thin washes of paint. Researching, scrambling, and re-situating signs in their paintings is their way of questioning the images that determine our movements and feelings. Their practice extends beyond painting primarily through dance music and nightlife. Rave culture and history provide for them not only conceptual inspiration for their studio work, but sensorial engulfment and pleasure as well. Both painting and DJ-ing operate as spaces of sensorial play and alterity for them; the two are always informing each other. These crossovers in sensibility are informed equally by their time in the studio and their time spent on dance floors. The social aspects of their music practice have also moved them to explore an ethos of collaboration and celebration in making. Their collaborative printmaking and design work, often manifested as party flyers for both real and imagined events, conceptually complement their paintings and tether their visual and sound/time-based practices together.

Ang Ziqi Zhang