Anna Zhang

Anna Zhang is a fashion designer as well as a textile and video artist who has exhibited in New York and Paris. Recent exhibitions include Paris Grand Palais, Paris Louvre Corousel, ArtExpo and Global Healing event in New York, and New York Fashion Week. Anna has received first place honours and notable recognition with the American Good Design Award, French Fashion Award, IDA Award, Muse Award, and IF Design Award. She has been published by Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

The performative fashion works and photography of Anna Zhang entail dripping, spatial fibers in neutral tones which are a reflection of sorrow, despair, and melancholiness. Specifically known as Melting…, the fashion series incorporates burning which is reflective of traditional Chinese rituals as a way to communicate with the deceased. This specific series reflects Anna Zhang’s experience of losing her grandmother, with the loss significant due to cultural traditions in strong family bonds. By burning the fabric in her fashion works and textile art, she creates a distinct aesthetic of form which seems to cling towards the ground in a metaphorical and metaphysical pronunciation of profound desolation. The models in the fashion photography seem to reflect inner reflection as they blend into the background of the atmosphere with pink and black camouflaged expressions of tattered fiber or seemingly stand in contrast to another or the background as the drooping of the threads become accentuated as if they were remnants of a refugee.

In Anna Zhang’s video art, veiny digitized figures melt into each other and ominous scenes of industrial zones and forests are captured like film negatives with revealing texts which expresses a sense of yearning. To You, After All Time is a video which is a reflection of desire through changing environments and figures which seem to converge into a synthesis or collective metamorphosis. The animated video conveys the elastic and perception of eternal bonds with a partner. Much like the fashion and fiber works, there is a consistent display of attachment to others and an expression of how relationships shape the identity of the self, specifically through loss, by either death or social distance. In the fashion design, the viewer may feel a sense of informality with the tattered fibers and loose application. As a result, the works are highly relatable on an emotional level yet retain high art conceptual integrity through experimental applications and indirect narrative implications. 

Melting… V. 4 (pictured above) depicts an ominous figure blending into the darkness of the background. His rugged fibered attire appears as if lingering and grasping towards the floor with some aspects appearing similar to a cocoon or spider’s web. The sporadic application of the fiber and seemingly ‘wrapped’ portion of the anatomy become attributed to the figure much like a trench coat in tatters. This piece reflects a sense of distance of the figure and a pronunciation of the attire as a breathing entity which conveys lingering memory.

As an artist, Anna Zhang can be described as an experimental innovator who pushes multidisciplinary approaches, especially fashion design, into realms of form as concept. These deeply conceptual works portray a narrative of relationships and how the structure and configuration of the fiber (as well as clever video editing) can reveal a psychological journey into how connections and correlations with others define the self as well as the purpose of the collective. Whether the collective is a culture or attributed social solidarity, the works of Anna Zhang offer poignant commentary on how experimental attributes of metaphysical metaphors, such as burning or metamorphosis, define our emotional existence.

https://annazofficial.cargo.site