Evian Wenyi Zhang
Flanigan & Cotillo
2022
Acrylic on canvas
195 x 520 cm
Evian’s practice explores the interrelation between the observer and the observed. In her densely composed paintings, she rearranged subjective visual fixations (defined as Areas of Interest, AOI) in accordance with a cognitive progression of saccade, that afterwards reassembled into a tabulation form of painting, visualizing the result of this cognitive study.
She forgoes the figurative artist’s or photographer’s insistence on the pictorial composition and geometry of subject matters, such as a solid-colored background that no one truly pays attention to, or the repetitive and unchanging floral pattern of a blanket, etc. Areas without visual interest are completely abandoned. Only remaining AOIs and its respective duration form a tabular pattern available for analysis, rich in information and vivacity. She has an aesthetic appreciation of tabulation and its indicative nature, or, more accurately, an obsession with statistical analysis and efficient categorization.
About Evian Wenyi Zhang:
Evian Wenyi Zhang (b.2000, Shanghai) currently lives and works between Shanghai and New York City. She is a B.A. candidate in Studio Art at New York University. She studies the changes of cognitive habits during the era of simulacra with chart-like paintings and large-format photography. Her practice investigates how a formatted medium invented by human beings can define reality.