_Peach Blossom Spring_ references its namesake (桃花源記), a fable written by Tao Yuanming in 421 CE. The story follows a fisherman whose route through a river lined by a forest of peach trees led him to the chance discovery of an ethereal utopia—a village living in harmony with nature and blissfully ignorant to the change of political regimes impacting the outside world. After returning home, the fisherman shared news of his journey, yet was never able to locate this utopia again. _Peach Blossom Spring_ is about an idealistic world that does not exist, and the precarity of the in-between—swaying between the known and unknown, the real and the mythical.  
  
Taken from the original Old Chinese text, the characters are written in Traditional writing, but read in the modern way, from left to right:  
芳草鮮美 fragrant grass, lush and vibrant  
落英繽紛 petals falling in riotous profusion

Peach Blossom Spring

Spiral

Requittal

You and Me

Burning Ritual (for Leaving & Not Lingering)

_Ways of Seeing_ overlays an image cut from Artforum on top of a playful Chinese rhyme about finding squirrels instead after a failed tiger safari. A classic in contemporary visual criticism, John Berger’s namesake essay collection asks viewers to reconsider how we are conditioned to see the world: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

Ways of Seeing

Prime Time

Flea Doll (For a Love That Renews & a Story That Is My Own)

Chula

Titled after a quote from “The Idiot”, Elif Batuman's coming-of-age novel on transition and translation, the work features beaded teardrops of quote in morse code.

so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was

Anglerfish, JFK airport, a teenage Wendi Deng Murdoch, and her cutout embracing her ex-husband from Vanity Fair’s article on their divorce “Seduced and Abandoned”

Wendi (for Lure & Adaption) 

There is a scene in the film _The Last Emperor_ in which the young Puyi, China’s last emperor, shows more fascination with a cricket than with matters of state at a court meeting. His tutor R.J. Johnston in the film describes him as the loneliest boy on earth. Swung between luxury and destitution, Puyi remained as powerless as an insect in captivity throughout his life. It is said that after the death of his beloved wife Wanrong, he attempted to speak with her spirit through _die xian_ 碟仙, a Chinese adaptation of the Ouija board.

One side of the miniature painting in this piece depicts the imagined séance, while the other side portrays a ghost dragon, hovering above a barren landscape. Created during my recent trip to China, it grew out of my observations of the dualities that run through both personal and public life in the once-familiar country I grew up in: at what point can one claim themself a victim if care must hurt? What are the invisible contracts that underlie intimacy?

The Loneliest Child on Earth

_Lute Fish (for Transformation & Grace)_ merges a selfie taken in front of Vladimir Nikolić’s Walking with Water with a stock image of anglerfish and the first few bars of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. “Lute fish” in Chinese, the anglerfish thrives under immense pressure, darkness, and scarcity, an archetype of both allure and grotesque, especially in its feminized form. The work reflects on the tension between magnetism and boundary, drawing in and letting go, and the independence made possible through evolutionary absurdity and survival tactics.

Lute Fish (for Transformation & Grace)

a misspelled love poem and my childhood impulse to capture butterflies to keep for myself

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Ketty Zhang

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