Shengni Zhang

Shengni was born in Beijing in 1996. She studied MA Visual Communication - Experimental Communication (2018-2020) at the Royal College of Art, London and BA Visual Communication at Macau University of Science and Technology (2014-2018), and was an exchange student at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (2017), studying art history. She worked as a visual designer at the Institute of Intelligent Interaction Systems in Tsinghua University, Beijing. 

Several of her works have won awards; Brick was awarded the silver medal in Chinese Creative Yearbook 2019, Piano won the bronze medal of Yearbook of Chinese Students' Art Works 2018, Memory of Macau won the innovative award of Macau International Tourism Souvenir Design Competition, Sketch of Macau won the award of Annual Open Competition of Celebrating the 17th Anniversary of Macao's Return. 

Shengni’s work has been exhibited internationally. Stop Spinning was selected for Beijing international design week (2019), My Heterotopia was exhibited in The West Works, London (2019), The Tortoise Nest was exhibited in White City Palace, London (2019). Human and AI was exhibited in The Garden House, London (2019). Universe 647 was exhibited in Lumen Studio, London, (2018). Praia de Hac Sá was exhibited in Macao University of Science and Technology, Macao, China (2016). 

My work attempts to visualise abstract concepts such as those connected to scientific research and philosophy. I am interested in how a visual language may communicate these ideas to audiences. I work across different media but I am particularly interested in new areas of making such as 3D art, virtual reality (VR), AI-generated art and working with data and programming languages.

My project, My Dream, My Heterotopia, uses my own dreams to generate images that bring my audiences to abnormal spaces, which exist in reality but that can only be reached through imagination. Heterotopia is a concept elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe certain cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow “other”, it’s “neither here, nor there”. My dreams are my heterotopia. I am interested in the relationship between three dimensional and two dimensional spaces, and the illusionistic qualities of light, material and shapes that can be created in 3D imaging software. Visual motifs such as grass always appear in my images similar to Yayoi Kusama’s dots or Magritte’s green apple. While I am influenced by their ideas of surrealism I am also drawing upon analytical imagery that could be found in science or engineering.  

Now I am still doing research in the field of art and science, I feel that many concepts have to be rethought entirely through our present digital era. I would like to further study on this and might apply for a PhD degree.