Artist Highlight - Hantao Zhuang

1. A Place of Interlocking begins with overlooked urban spaces. What draws you to these transitional or anonymous environments?

I don’t think I’m drawn to these spaces because they are special in themselves, but precisely because they are so easily ignored. Corridors, passageways, corners of buildings and temporary structures are usually just places people pass through, rather than really look at. But for me, it is in these ordinary spaces that feelings of waiting, distance and uncertainty become more visible. They are like gaps within the city: places without a clear identity, yet they still shape how we feel our relationship with ourselves and our surroundings.

2. The work refers to “non places” within contemporary city life. How do you understand a non place, and what kind of emotional charge can it hold?

For me, a non-place is not a space without emotion, but a space where it is difficult to feel a sense of belonging. It is often connected with passing through, waiting and moving. You may know exactly where you are, but still find it hard to feel settled. The feeling it creates is not dramatic or intense, but a more everyday, quiet kind of unease. It can carry loneliness, suspension and a temporary sense of safety, while also making you aware that you are only one moving part within the city’s system.

3. Your installation uses acrylic and metal to reconstruct fragments of everyday architecture. How did these materials help you express instability, memory, or uncertainty?

For me, metal suggests support, order and architectural structure, while acrylic brings transparency, reflection and a sense of visual instability. I place urban images between these materials, so they feel both preserved and interrupted. The images are not shown as complete or fixed. They are constantly changed by frames, joints, reflections and the viewer’s angle. In this sense, the work feels close to how memory operates. Memory is not something kept intact, but something repeatedly reshaped through different structures and experiences.

4. The work moves between installation and photography. How do these two modes change the way we encounter the same spatial idea?

The installation turns space into a real object. The viewer can feel its scale, edges, transparency and the relationships between different materials. Photography then turns this structure back into an image, making it feel more like a memory, or a kind of psychological trace. The installation is closer to bodily experience, while photography is closer to remembering and looking. Moving between these two forms allows the same space to shift, so it is no longer just an architectural fragment, but something moving between object, image and psychological feeling.

5. You describe home not as a fixed place, but as a fragile psychological condition. How does this idea appear within A Place of Interlocking?

In this work, “home” does not appear as a traditional house, but through a need for boundary and shelter. The work looks like a small structure, as if it could surround, support or protect something. At the same time, it is transparent, open and incomplete. It can never really become a stable shelter. That is exactly what I want to explore: home is not just a place, but a fragile psychological condition. Once outside pressure enters, it starts to become uncertain.

6. The forms in the work suggest protection, but also exposure. How important is this tension between safety and vulnerability?

This tension is really important to me. I do not want to make a completely closed or completely safe structure, because that would feel too certain. In reality, safety is rarely whole. It often exists alongside exposure, vulnerability and outside pressure. The structure in the work seems to protect the image, but the transparent materials, gaps and reflections keep making it visible and disturbed. It sits between shelter and exposure, and this unstable state feels closer to how people actually experience the city.

7. Your practice often uses familiar images such as houses, windows, trees, and city fragments. Why do ordinary symbols become so unstable in your work?

These symbols interest me because they already carry ideas of stability. A house suggests safety, a window suggests connection, a tree suggests growth, and urban structures suggest order. But in real experience, these meanings do not always hold. Home can also feel unsettling, a window can bring exposure, and urban order can create distance. I want to make these familiar symbols feel uncertain again, so the psychological tension behind them becomes more visible.

8. The work seems to sit between public order and private emotion. How do you approach this relationship when building the installation?

I usually start with a more rational, public visual language: frames, grids, structures and repeated urban images. They suggest order, almost like the way a city operates. But when I reassemble these elements into a small installation, they become less stable, and start to carry something more personal. I don’t want to show emotion directly. I want it to slowly emerge through gaps, overlaps and incompleteness. For me, private feeling is not separate from the city; it is often formed within public space.

9. Within The Strange Everyday, your work makes ordinary urban surroundings feel uncertain and psychologically charged. What do you hope viewers begin to notice differently about the spaces they pass through every day?

I hope viewers realise that everyday space is not just a neutral background. The corridors, corners, frames and temporary structures we pass through each day may already be affecting our emotions, but in such subtle ways that we often miss them. My work is not about turning ordinary spaces into spectacles. It is more about making people feel their uncertainty again. Places that seem to have no story may actually hold waiting, pressure, movement, loneliness, and brief but real moments of safety.