Hedy Zhang

Hedy Zhang is an Asian queer woman performance artist who grew up in intersectional three cultures.
While Hedy went to 17 cities in the United States, Mexico, and China, she began to question the system of mental illness in human society. Hedy started writing and taking photographs in 2014.
In 2018, she began to study at The New School, Parsons School of Design, New York, majoring in Fine Arts and minoring in Gender Studies.
On 2022, February 11th the early morning, a performance of mandarin hand-writing artwork "yishu" expressed in a first-person character published on her official IG art account, was forced by New York Police Department to delete because a nationalist repeatedly called to frame the author
as mentally abnormal.
By this incident, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD) and started to create abstract visual and performance art language.
The woman, the capital “I”, is cancelled, and when a woman expresses herself, a context is imposed on the premise of "this word comes from a woman".
In 2022, by collecting and arranging Hedy's family archives(as early as 1930), an oral history of kinship, and ten years of self-recording, she started developing the documentary "The West Side of East River"-- an alienated woman’s growth, retelling the Chinese queer language.
In the series of oil paintings Absent: Self-Portrait, Hedy Zhang observed her nudity and focused on her body’s changes which had experienced violence. Her painting for herself is like writing Zhang's diary, she talks to herself, accompany, comfort, and heal. Hedy Zhang's painting practice transforms stagnant radical energy into affirmation and attention, and she tries to look back at the absence of childhood and question the invisible dogmatism that has been imposed on women.
Hedy hopes to reshape and restate gender structures and queer language in Chinese contexts through the creation of artistic personas and academic research on a fluid gender.

Submitted by CUT ART