Digital Landscape
1 day
Location: Providence, Rhode Island
Country: USA
Year: 2023
Link to video
Documentation of a week’s worth of digital imagery that was presented on social media in an audio diary is overlaid on top of a video recording that spans over one day, walking backwards, using only the phone as a set of eyes to guide the self through the city. The path between the doctor’s office, the studio, meeting with a friend, and grocery shopping become pronounced when usually overlooked as a means to a goal. The act of walking through the medium of the phone explores ways we occupy and interact with time in the digital landscape and how this relationship may align, interrupt, propel, and influence our experience of time in the physical world.
Inner Monologue
5 min
Location: Home, Providence, Rhode Island
Country: USA
Year: 2023
Link to video
Video is overlaid with overlapping tracks of audio exploring the nature of self censorship and self surveillance. Using the cloak and makeup as censors for the body, the face is gradually destroyed with lipstick used to create this veil— painting the skin bright red. The performance attempts to highlight the anger produced around being censored, clothed, and surveiled. It addresses the woman, the woman artist, and the art as woman and questions the role of self complicity in objectification and suppression.
Ice Break Piece
5 min
Location: Home, Providence, Rhode Island
Country: USA
Year: 2023
Link to video
Ice Breaker Piece is a score that consists of two seated participants amongst a group that is standing. The room is given a set of instructions to uncover what is beneath a ceramic cake dome by retrieving a frozen ceramic spoon inside of a block of ice, surrounded by various glass vessels containing water under a five minute time limit. The performance uses over handcrafted 50 pieces of dinnerware in ceramics, glass, and textiles made by the artists.
The event is interrupted half way through and seated participants are tied with woven yarn handcuffs amongst the recitation of two parallel narratives. The seated participants are told they may resume without leaving their seats.
The performance seeks to challenge ideas of duality and social ritual. Traditional glass, ceramics, and textiles are ubiquitous to a dining ceremony and function as a matrix for a hegemonic structure of reality by proposing a single and definite reality of participation. Attention is brough to the examination of materials in their capacity to subvert these social scripts and break the “frame” of this reality and the divisions created.
Ji Zou
e: azou@risd.edu
ig: ji.zouu
Practice
Hmong Chinese American artist practicing painting, illustration, and sometimes video art. Often thinking about the fragility of reality, the connection between waking and dream worlds, what is invisible but felt, what is self, and what it means to love. Their practice is diaristic and self reflexive and often draws from meditations, dreams, memories, and imagined futures. Through their work, they seek to get closer— closer to others, closer to being, closer to truth— by recognition of the ever present gaps and voids.
Biography
Raised in suburban Michigan, they grew up in a cross cultural, polygynous family. During their undergraduate studies in Neuroscience and Sociology, they became interested in meditation practices introduced to them by professors and friends. In their first 10 day silent meditation, painting was the only thing they could think of. Shortly after, they moved to New York City and began to work in commercial illustration and the restaurant industry. They continued to experiment as a digital painter for 6 years before attending Rhode Island School of Design for their MFA in illustration.
Since beginning their painting practice in 2022, their work has been presented widely in group exhibitions at Collaborations, Copenhagen; The Hole, New York; Vardan Gallery, LA; and more. They were awarded the Presidential Fellowship at RISD (2022) and published as the cover artist of New American Paintings (165).