Sining Zhu (2023)
Dates of residency: Term 6：9/11~11/3 2023
Sining Zhu, (b. Beijing, China) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, video, performance, sound, and multimedia. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is studying for an MFA in Fine Arts at the California Institute of Arts. Her practice focuses on the complicated relationship and cognition of identity between the self and others and the interaction and separation of the individual and the group. Her enthusiastic roots in research and collective behavior, which she uses to explore contemporary art practice and reveal indisputable facts and hidden delicate sorrow in the social environment. By overlaying everyday, personal, reminiscent objects and accumulating new contexts and meanings to awaken collective resonance.
She devoted herself to creating works during her residency in preparation for her solo exhibition, Searching for The Forest Reverberation. Utilizing the backyard of SAIKONEON and the surrounding natural environment—at times incorporating these elements as materials—she developed her work, which was ultimately presented at an alternative space in Tokyo.
Exhibition Statement from the Artist
In the forest near my location, I apply natural rubber liquid to the surface of the trees, let it dry, remove it, and reconstruct it as a “rubber tree,” creating the illusion of a transplanted and concealed forest. The natural plant fragments and the rubber interweave and resist each other, generating a new “forest.”
At the base of the installation, a mound of earth branches out in multiple directions, resembling tree roots extending outward. Each branch is tapped to play field recordings of the forest, explosions, house demolitions, numbers, warnings, and other sounds, drawing attention to the diversity that is gradually being lost, the invisible scars, and the persistence of life.
This land has been preserved in its natural state due to geographical reasons, making it unsuitable for the introduction of rubber trees, which thrive in subtropical rainforests. However, the immense demand for rubber, industrial production, and the pursuit of profit through plantation development continue in other locations, perpetuated by globalization. The activities of the Anthropocene have distorted and contradicted the natural connections between plants. The contexts of post-colonialism, gentrification, and forced migration extend beyond humans, affecting nature as well.
Artist Web : https://siningzhustudio.com/
Sining Zhu (2023)
Dates of residency: Term 6：9/11~11/3 2023
Sining Zhu, (b. Beijing, China) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, video, performance, sound, and multimedia. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is studying for an MFA in Fine Arts at the California Institute of Arts. Her practice focuses on the complicated relationship and cognition of identity between the self and others and the interaction and separation of the individual and the group. Her enthusiastic roots in research and collective behavior, which she uses to explore contemporary art practice and reveal indisputable facts and hidden delicate sorrow in the social environment. By overlaying everyday, personal, reminiscent objects and accumulating new contexts and meanings to awaken collective resonance.
She devoted herself to creating works during her residency in preparation for her solo exhibition, Searching for The Forest Reverberation. Utilizing the backyard of SAIKONEON and the surrounding natural environment—at times incorporating these elements as materials—she developed her work, which was ultimately presented at an alternative space in Tokyo.
Exhibition Statement from the Artist
In the forest near my location, I apply natural rubber liquid to the surface of the trees, let it dry, remove it, and reconstruct it as a “rubber tree,” creating the illusion of a transplanted and concealed forest. The natural plant fragments and the rubber interweave and resist each other, generating a new “forest.”
At the base of the installation, a mound of earth branches out in multiple directions, resembling tree roots extending outward. Each branch is tapped to play field recordings of the forest, explosions, house demolitions, numbers, warnings, and other sounds, drawing attention to the diversity that is gradually being lost, the invisible scars, and the persistence of life.
This land has been preserved in its natural state due to geographical reasons, making it unsuitable for the introduction of rubber trees, which thrive in subtropical rainforests. However, the immense demand for rubber, industrial production, and the pursuit of profit through plantation development continue in other locations, perpetuated by globalization. The activities of the Anthropocene have distorted and contradicted the natural connections between plants. The contexts of post-colonialism, gentrification, and forced migration extend beyond humans, affecting nature as well.
Artist Web : https://siningzhustudio.com/