Kangyue Zhang

Zhang Kangyue, a Chinese artist born in Japan and influenced by Japanese aesthetics ‘ Mono-aware’ and ‘ Wabi Sabi’, unconsciously captures beauty’s vulnerability in objects, using sound, sketch, image and text to present her perception of the material and immaterial. She works on themes connected to personal experience, every day, death and life, and simply living, which come from a close connection to family affection. 

The artwork Another Goodbye’ is part of the project ‘Shattered Echoes’, which is a response to the death of her mother and focuses on documenting her grief over the traumatic event of losing her mother. She was inspired by her fragmented memories and her mother’s belongings, as well as the expression of her desires in her dreams. In her work, she shows the hidden hurts of intimate relationships and the chains of her mother’s love, complex feelings that continue to linger and remain after her mother’s death. 

In the context of the post-digital era, she invokes the concept of Liminal Space to explore the connections between memory, reality and dreams, death and life. She mainly uses visual poetry as a creative strategy, combining sound, sketch and photogram, and final production as an experimental film to express the fear and the inexpressible feelings of farewell between life and death.