Tianyi Zheng

Where Comes Mulan is a research-based moving-image installation that weaves video, photo, sound, and space to explore “Mulan” as a complex symbol across history, myth, and nationhood. Since the 1990s, the artist’s hometown has been reshaped into “Mulan Township,” where she is staged as a brand and spectacle. Yet in memories, she appears as a commodity, martyr, goddess, and ghost. This work searches between grand official narratives and everyday memory.

Where Comes Mulan is a research-based moving-image installation that weaves video, photo, sound, and space to explore “Mulan” as a complex symbol across history, myth, and nationhood. Since the 1990s, the artist’s hometown has been reshaped into “Mulan Township,” where she is staged as a brand and spectacle. Yet in memories, she appears as a commodity, martyr, goddess, and ghost. This work searches between grand official narratives and everyday memory.

The ongoing project "Where Comes Mulan" centres around the connection between the fictional character Mulan and my hometown of Mulan town, Huangpi. It explores the intricate relationship between the tourism industry, mythology, and ideology. It is gonna be the starting point of my journey diving into the complexities of identity, gender, and culture in China.

A Collection of Urban Nothingness is an ongoing project, focused on collecting urban domestic waste and investigating people's travels and displacements. Through a process of collecting, wandering, and constructing, this project seeks to examine the often-overlooked ways in which waste is caused by mobility and to highlight the hidden stories and histories embedded in discarded objects, especially discarded furniture and household items.

'As the Wind Passes by the Surface of Your City' captures the essence of urban whispers and discarded stories, unfolding where time converges with fragments of the street. Ninngouu presents a live performance/filming process on-site. Through film and poetic narratives, they attempt to give voice to the ghost held by street debris.

“Sleepless Nights Wake Up the Plants” showcases a selection of still-life slides of plants curated by Tianyi Zheng, accompanied by sound and vocal elements provided by Sojung Lee. The performance aims to re-examine the images of plants from a more-than-human perspective, inviting the audience to explore the beauty and eerie of botanical imagery.
2023
Slide film projection, sound, video documentation.
12'23"

WAKE UP THE BATS (trailer)- A Sonic Improvisation. Koumaria Residency Project 2023 @medeaelectronique

On site performance, video, sounds, colour
18’06”
2023

Videography, Synthesizer by @zheng_tianyi
Percussion, Synthesizer by @stanfordcheung
Percussion, Cornet by Eric Lewis

"The Ship of Fools" is a reflection of ZHENG Tianyi after 4 years of living in Holland. It includes some mental and physical memories. She left the city in a pure and precious era, and preserved some of our unlikely memories. The works she brought back to Hong Kong are about memories we cannot have anymore, because all the people who remember have left.

The performance focused on the materiality of cable ties, which we find interesting as they can be functional as well as metaphorical. They are commonly found in our daily life, on construction sites, and in exhibition spaces. But also on the roadblock made by protesters, and at the hands of the arrested. During the performance, we explored how cable ties restrain, reshape or transform our bodies. By amplifying the repetitive zipping and breaking sound, it was just like never-ending fights.

As an office, as well as a meeting place, one of the main activities of the Department of Collective Collaboration is that of facilitating (in-person) conversations. Although the somewhat large (conference) table may fool you, these talks hardly involve anything conventionally office-like: the majority (if not all) of our work is performed casually; through water cooler gatherings, lunch talks and smoking-break conversations.

Acting as a continuous nesting process (or almost a residency), the exhibition will open halfway through, as an on-site sharing of our methodologies, but also as a celebration of our conceptual common ground. Until the very end we will be challenging and (re)building each other's works, in order to rethink what art making really means.

May the Art World Tear Us Apart Til We Meet Again brings together 12 artist friends to share their struggles with being an artist. The exhibition is based on The Real Story by Curator and Artist MeMe. In-depth conversations between the 12 artists have been translated into 12 questions and these have been returned to them – Curator MeMe is awaiting an answer. Talking about the personal struggles in the art sector has produced this exhibition. During the exhibition

AFAIR (as far as I remember) is a search for possibilities and counter-narratives to look again at place and destination, often with personal histories, memories and connotations. The artists Giath Taha (Syria, 1982), Jean-Baptiste Castel (France, 1994), Tianyi Zheng (China, 1995), George Mazari (Germany/Afghanistan, 1992) created new works especially for SIGN that were presented during AFAIR are shown .

Originated from the political movement in Hong Kong in 2019, “𝘈 𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘚𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳” is a mixed media installation that metaphorically tells the story of the exiled imagination and suppressed. It is generally thought of grieving as something personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we lesson the power of the forces that debilitate us. It is hoped that grievance would become a power to alleviate suffering and healing.