Zhan Zhang is a Toronto-based visual artist known for her soft sculptures and paper art animations, which possess a fragile and otherworldly quality. In the same way of “line drawing”, paper cutting is broken into the smallest unit in the medium – the cuts – an attempt to place this often-dismissed form and material in a broader cultural context, re-imagine the function of tactile practices in the contemporary environment of information overload and collective memories.

In Zhang’s art, valid reality is sincerely replaced with strange combinations of objects and events. Inanimate and animate things assume similar characters through convergence. The distorted forms embody delicacy and precision, put viewers inside a moment to experience the dreams and unconscious, the loneliness and confusion, and the divinity in a single glance, and question the reality surrounding us.

Zhang graduated with an Honours B.A., double majoring in Visual Arts and Arts Management, from the University of Toronto, and followed with graduate studies in 3D Animation at Seneca College.