Sophie Zhang

My paintings attempt to solicit from the experience of temporality an abstract diagram, to stage a relationship between the play of objects and the traces of language. There is within this a play of the syntax of drawing, painting and sculpting in my practice, in order to create a meeting point between imagination and memory.

While my subject matter, recently being influenced by a 4000-year-old Chinese vessel from the V&A Museum, serves as ciphers for an experience of time (and fascination) that touches the threshold of memory, the graphical and painterly syntax is drawn from a more immediate Modernist memory. So the abstract diagram of time is drawn from the triangulation of archaic, modernist and contemporary periods. 

Thus each painting emerges out of strife between oblivion and recollection: for each mark or shape there are traces of lines that cannot surface as visibility yet are somehow retained. Trace here might imply a sense of a pulse that is outside the theatre of signification. The cross over point between emptiness and presence is like an invisible bridge that might be understood as a pulse so the attempt here is to figure such crossing over points.