Talks - Dino Zhang

Dino Zhang:
Tracing Time through Blue Ceilings, Shifting Rivers, and Fragmented Metropolis

March 2025

Writer: Yuqi Wang

Editor: Jiani Wang

About the artist:

Dino Zhang is an artist filmmaker and researcher based in London and Shanghai. He holds a BA degree in Fine Art from the Central Saint Martins and an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. His works have recently been presented at the Beijing International Short Film Festival 2024; HOME, Manchester; the Slow Film Festival 2024, London; MOUart Gallery, Beijing; Goethe-Institut, Shanghai; and The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London. He is the recipient of the 2024 Elephant Trust Award.

www.dino-zhang.com

@dino0zhang

About the writer:

Yuqi Wang is an art critic and practicing filmmaker, currently serving as the chief editor of PAI ART, an online art journal dedicated to emerging East Asian artists and art news. She holds a degree in Fine Art Mixed Media from the University of Westminster. Her films have been featured in independent film festivals and recognized with several award nominations. Wang's primary research interests lie in identity cognition, time-space displacement, and the life-death cycle.

Zhang's practice weaves together threads of memory, history, and identity. Employing an auto-ethnographic framework to retrace the past, he approaches his practice as inherently research-oriented, gathering cumulative materials and archives from his family and hometown. Through grieving, contemplating, and reconciling with the contradictory discourses of the past, he seeks heterochronic narratives that connect us to the field of socio-cultural history. Often taking the form of expanded cinema, his works move from a mode of thought and lyricism to a mode of resilience, stretching beyond the expanding landscape of archival imagery.

The Ceiling of My Bedroom was Painted in Blue, 2024

Installation view at Acme Studio, London, as a part of the exhibition “Thresholds of Perception”, 2024

An example of Zhang’s excavation of autobiographical memory and its connection to broader themes is “The Ceiling of My Bedroom Was Painted in Blue” (2024). Developed during the Associate Studio Programme in London, this sculptural work slips into the artist’s childhood experiences. Using the colour blue as both a visual and emotional current which envelops the space, the piece explores themes of nostalgia, the passage of time, and the quiet unfolding of love stories within his family.

By juxtaposing personal anecdotes with intimate narratives and historical contexts, Zhang illustrates how individual stories can reflect and inform collective histories. In doing so, he invites viewers to contemplate their own connections to the past—and the enduring presence of love in the family narratives.

Upon that River, 2023

Single channel, 4K video, Stereo sound, 28'44

Zhang’s single-channel film Upon that River (2023) resonates with themes of history, place, and identity. It exemplifies his engagement with the cultural experience of migration and how moving between geographies informs his perspective. The work explores his family’s past by examining an inherited photo album and revisiting the locations captured in the photographs.

Beginning with a conversation between the artist and his family, the film blends personal and historical inquiry with visual experimentation. It reflects the investigative and reflective approach shaped by Zhang’s experience of displacement—journeying along the Fu Chun River to the Qiang Tang River to revive historical events and figures in spectral forms. Touching on a broader narrative of regional diaspora, the film explores the intersection of personal history and the socio-economic transformations of early 20th-century China.

There, there, 2024

4K video & Super 8mm film transferred to 4K video, Stereo Sound, 20'00

In his latest film There, there (2024), Zhang traces the origins of the project to the late 20th century, when the construction of a new radio and television tower led his grandfather and colleagues to conduct a feasibility study. Following China’s economic reform, Shanghai underwent rapid and dramatic urbanization—its landscape evolving daily, leaving the city both familiar and alien to the artist: “there, yet not there.” This personal experience of transformation, coupled with temporal disorientation and recurring memories, forms the foundation of the film.

Using both 4K video and Super 8mm film to create a striking textural contrast, the work mirrors the tension between fragmented personal memory and the grand, often disquieting narrative of hegemonic history.

In the echoes of blue ceilings, the flow of rivers, and the transforming metropolis, Zhang conjures a space where personal remembrance and the sweep of history converse. His practice invites us to navigate the fragmented passage of time and discover fleeting moments that shape our shared past. Through his lens, the past becomes not a static archive but a living, breathing entity—continuously reshaping the contours of the present and whispering possibilities for an alternative future.