Artist Highlight - Zan Wang

1. Your cyanotype process captures the botanical traces of home in an incredibly poetic way. What draws you to this medium as a vessel for memory and emotion?

What draws me to cyanotype is its inherently haunting quality—the way it captures not the object itself, but its trace. Cyanotype relies on light and time to inscribe absence. The resulting image is a ghost of what once touched the surface. For me, this absence speaks deeply to the experience of home, especially when home is no longer a fixed place but something distant, abstracted, or remembered through fragments. I think of home as a site of detachment: something I carry with me, but which is always slightly out of reach. The process feels less like representation and more like recalling as if the forms surfaced from memory. Cyanotype’s blue color and its slow, light-sensitive exposure process mirror a longing for home that only would emerge when one is distant from home. The cyanotype invites viewers to dwell in a perception between visibility and fading, between reality and memory.


2. Your work beautifully balances presence and absence, the visible and the spectral. How do you navigate this tension when building each layer of your paintings?

The tension between presence and absence is something I want to invite when I build each layer. I think in terms of creating conditions for things to emerge and retreat. A memory that often returns to me is of looking at Japanese paper screens in a dark living room, with sunlight filtering through from outside. The bamboo leaves cast shadows onto the screen. Move gently as the wind passes through. The screen wasn’t transparent like a window, so I never saw the bamboo itself—only its shifting shadow. As the wind weaved through the leaves, they moved in and out of visibility, sometimes casting their form onto the screen, sometimes withdrawing. Each layer in my painting holds this kind of instability—it may dominate from one angle, then dissolve from another. Cyanotype allows me to work with this rhythm. In cyanotype, nothing is fully present. The form gradually emerges from the surface, and the image always carries a sense of distance—like something half-remembered. I see this not only as a visual layering, but as a way of perceiving: how memory, emotion, and presence don’t arrive all at once. They drift, flicker, and return.


3. The title “Of Mountain and Sea” evokes vast natural elements—what role does landscape, either remembered or imagined, play in shaping your idea of home?

For me, landscape evokes a state of mind. In the tradition of Chinese ink painting, landscape is a poetic construction of longing, reflection, and inner space. I often think about the emptiness in the landscapes of Muqi, a Chan Buddhist monk and painter from the Southern Song dynasty. His use of emptiness creates space for the mind to wander. When I construct a landscape in my own work, I’m drawing on that same idea of emptiness as presence—a space where longing can reside, where the feeling of home is suspended, becoming, and shaped by new experiences and encounters elsewhere. In that sense, landscape becomes a way to hold the unspoken. It’s not about returning to a place, but about seeing home with a fresh eye—looking at past memory from the present, and letting that distance become part of the form.


4. You mention working with plants from your home in China. How do these botanical elements act as emotional anchors across time and distance?

The plants I use in my work are everyday things from my childhood garden in China—things I once barely noticed. But through distance, they’ve held onto something fleeting and personal. These botanical forms become emotional anchors by pointing to what is no longer there. A single stalk of dogtail grass recalls the walk home from school. A reed brings back memories of autumn afternoons hiking on a stone-covered riverbank. A flowering osmanthus tree evokes the scent of September—rain-soaked and sweet—lingering through the first month of school. These plants become sites of longing—quiet, unspoken reminders of where I come from and what has shifted since. They act as temporal bridges, connecting the present act of making with the past spaces I’ve lived through. The plants keep that distance tender and stay close to something that is already far.


5. You describe a state of “in-betweenness” in your work—how has your personal journey between cultures informed this recurring theme in your practice?

Having moved between cultures and landscapes—China, the United States, and now the UK—I often find myself caught between worlds: not fully here, not fully there. This in-betweenness becomes a space of perception, where things aren’t fixed but layered, drifting, and open to reinterpretation. In my work, I try to hold that tension as a form of coexistence. I often return to that moment of standing before a glass window in New York, seeing both the reflection of the street behind me and the warm light inside a room. That visual split—of looking and being looked through—mirrors how I feel moving through different cultures. Memory, identity, and spatial awareness all exist at once, sometimes overlapping, sometimes slipping past each other.


6. As an artist and researcher, how does your academic inquiry feed into your material decisions or shape the narratives within your studio practice ?

For me, theory reflects back what I’m already trying to express through practice. Reading philosophers, critics, and artists across different traditions—whether it’s phenomenology or deconstruction—helps me articulate things I intuitively sense while making but haven’t yet put into language. For example, when I encountered Yi-Fu Tuan’s idea that place emerges through pause, it gave shape to why I’ve always been drawn to layered viewing and slowed perception. Material decisions—like working with cyanotype—also begin to resonate more deeply through this lens. Cyanotype, with its ghosted forms, echoes Derrida’s idea of haunting and the use of emptiness in Chinese ink painting. In this way, academic research and studio practice are deeply interwoven and feed into one another.

7. How do you hope viewers will engage with your work? What sensations or reflections would you like them to leave with after encountering it?

I hope viewers can pause and allow their perception to shift over time. I often think about the act of drifting—not just physically, but mentally. Viewers can feel like they’re moving through something porous and open, where things emerge gradually: a form that appears, a shadow that disappears, a trace that feels familiar but can’t quite be placed. If they leave with a sense of something that touched them—without fully revealing itself—I’m content with that.