Johanna Zhang NEAC

Statement

Narrative for me initiates a way of composing pictorial space rather than providing a literary content. It is a kite that sooner or later breaks away from the thread, at which point the painting renounces its origin and becomes at ease with its own alienation.

I’m indebted to three distinct pictorial traditions: Chinese narrative painting, for its revelation of interstitial spaces; Sienese painting, for its depiction of an intimate relationship between architecture and human activities; and 18th-century English genre painting in the form of the ‘conversation piece’—group portraits, often set in bourgeois domestic surroundings—which has, paradoxically, provided me with a new way of seeing strangers in the modern street. 

The living room is my Cantiere dell’Esilio. The drawing wall is the construction site to map the multi-figural history of the displaced. Glances of passersby captured in the railway station, precarious postures of puppets dressed in tissue paper: these record traces of the first inhabitants of the Republic of Exile.