CV
Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
2026 on going
Master of Research
Visual Communication Pathway
2023 - 2024
Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
Diploma
Korean Language and Literature
2019
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
Bachelor of Art
Creative Advertising
2015 - 2019
Kings College London
Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing, China
Gallery Assistant
Exhibition Set-up; Hospitality 2025
Hong Kong Lanyao International Co., Limited
Business owner
2020 – Present
Freelance Graphic Designer & Art Tutor
Creative Concept /Visual Communication
2018 - Present
Exhibition/Performance
Artist Collaboration
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Indesign
Final Cut Pro
Touch Designer
Cinema 4D
Keyshot10
Rhinoceros
Unreal Engine
Figma
International Experience
Visual Systems
Research & Analysis
Process Improvement
Teamwork
Leadership
Immersive Design
Visual Communication
Creative Direction
Problem-Solving
Client Relations
An d. Mole 9, 10317 Berlin, Germany
04.09.2026 - 27.09.2026
A Room for Unbecoming Women
The Handbag Factory, 3 Loughborough Street, London, United Kingdom, SE11 5TB
30.07.2026 - 03.08.2026
TABOO
Bradley House, 26 ST Albans LN, London, United Kingdom, NW11 7QE
23.07.2026 - 13.08.2026
THE WRONG International Biennale Transient Info
Virtual Worldwide
01.11.2025 - 31.03.2026
Visions in the Nunnery 2025
Bow Road & Nunnery Gallery, 181-183 Bow Road, London, United Kingdom, E3 2SJ
04.10.2025 - 09.11.2025
The Green Grammar
art'otel London Hoxton, 1-3 Rivington Street, London, United Kingdom, EC2A 3DT
27.06.2025 - 29.06.2025
Pieces of Me
Artworks East Gallery, 32-34 Osier Way, London, United Kingdom, E10 5SB
06.06.2025 - 04.07.2025
Behind the Closed Doors
Safehouse, 137 Copeland Road, London, United Kingdom, SE15 3SN
31.05.2025 - 03.06.2025
Permeate
West/Alte WU, Augasse 2-6, 1090 Vienna, Austria
29.03.2025 - 03.04.2025
Secret Salon: Electric Ladyland
Caveside Cl, Old Hill, Chislehurst, Kent, United Kingdom, BR7 5NL
14.12.2024
Instante
Echos Studio, Rua Pelotas, 400 - Vila Mariana, Sao Paulo, Brazil
07.12.2024 - 20.12.2024
The Dark Side
Boomer Gallery, 150 Tooley Street, London, United Kingdom, SE1 2TU
08.11.2024 - 13.11.2024
MYSTICAL
Fox Yard Studio, 6 Old Fox Yard, Stowmarket, Suffolk, United Kingdom, IP14 1AB
25.10.2024 - 05.11.2024
Sound Field Folding
Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson St, London, United Kingdom, E2 8JD
03.08.2024
MRes RCA 2024 Research Journeys
The Hanger Gallery, London, United Kingdom, SW11 4NL
26.07.2024 - 01.08.2024
Fragment for the Future; Movement
The Hanger Gallery, London, United Kingdom, SW11 4NL
29.04.2024 - 01.05.2024
Whispers of the Unseen: Sonic Alchemy
Iklectik, 20 Carlisle Lane, London, United Kingdom, SE1 7LG
13.12.2023
July 2025
FAD Magazine: “Behind the closed doors: Reconstructin the narrative of home in a crumbling house”
June 2025
Divide Magazine issue 12 Dec 2024
Collect Art Magazine winter issue seasonal edition
Dec 2024
Reflections of the Past, Visions of Tomorrow
Dec 2024
Artistcloseup Magazine issue 25
Dec 2024
Artistcloseup Blog individual interview
Oct 2024
Last Updated 2026.10.25
Iris Lingyu Zhang
drimyftif2017@gmail.com
Iris Lingyu Zhang (b. 1997, Beijing) is a multimedia artist and researcher working between London and Beijing. Her emotionally immersive works span digital and installation-based media, exploring feminist inquiries into the body, space, and desire. Drawing on psychology and philosophy, her practice negotiates identity, intimacy, and cultural memory through porous visual forms.
Iris holds a Master of Research from the Royal College of Art and pursuing her second Master’s degree in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has exhibited internationally, with recent shows including international Biennale THE WRONG, Visions in the Nunnery 2025 at London Bow Art Gallery, Permeate in Vienna, and Instante in São Paulo. Her work has also been presented at IKLECTIK, Hundred Years Gallery, and The Handbag Factory, among others.
Iris holds a Master of Research from the Royal College of Art and pursuing her second Master’s degree in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has exhibited internationally, with recent shows including international Biennale THE WRONG, Visions in the Nunnery 2025 at London Bow Art Gallery, Permeate in Vienna, and Instante in São Paulo. Her work has also been presented at IKLECTIK, Hundred Years Gallery, and The Handbag Factory, among others.
CONTACT
Content
Multi-Media
Painting
Audio-Visual
Exhibitions
Press
Multi-Media
Talking to him
2025
Multimedia Installation 300*150*150*cm
Sculpture, Moving Image(35’’loop), AI Technology
Found Objects, Materiality
The old television, as a relic of the analog era, once served as a carrier of authentic family memories, now transformed into a display window for digital fiction. AI technology constructs gazes that never existed by analyzing old photographs, creating a form of "hyperreality": far more perfect than reality, yet utterly false. This media displacement reveals a paradox—the more we rely on technology to correct the past, the further we drift from the authenticity of memory itself, becoming thoroughly pitiful.
As found objects, these items carry the weight of material memory. The old leather armchair recreates the power hierarchy of childhood family dynamics, with surface wear marks telling the story of an imagined family's history and damage; the coffee table exists in dependence on the sofa, yet reveals the possibility of independent existence in certain moments. The work reveals this subtle codependent relationship through the spatial arrangement of objects—the hierarchies and power structures between them are habitually defined, understood, and utilized by people.
I chose to include no sound art whatsoever in this work. In this silent space, silence becomes a present continuous tense. This renders the work's title even more ironic.
This piece points to a heartbreaking truth: everything is an illusion within power relations. Equality, symbiosis, independence, communication—whatever form it takes, it is nothing more than fabricated narrative, a utopian fantasy feast. The dialogue between my father and me has never truly existed, and never will.
Reborn
2024
Experimental Performance photography Installation 200*200*250cm
Performance 30’00”
The performance begins with a symbolic "birth"—the artist emerges naked from a bathtub, reconceptualizing the bathtub as a metaphorical space of the primordial womb. This opening not only references biological birth but suggests an existential reconstruction of the self. Subsequently, the artist enters the natural forest environment, exploring the dialogical relationship between body and organic space through experimental dance, ultimately returning to the embracing arms of the jungle.
This work continues the artist's sustained exploration of the concept of "body as container." By juxtaposing the intimate space of the adolescent bedroom with the public natural environment, the work questions traditional spatial boundaries and bodily limits. The core question posed by the artist—"If my fantasy is a room, if my body is a room"—reveals a radical spatial philosophy: the body not only occupies space but becomes the generator of space itself.
Within this conceptual framework, the artist imagines the self as "a light sphere emanating yellow luminescence," a poetic expression that suggests a state of existence transcending physical boundaries. Through analogizing different scales of space—body, room, city—the work explores how individual subjectivity is constructed and redefined through spatial practice.
Reborn is not only an expansion of traditional performance art boundaries but a profound meditation on contemporary body politics and spatial phenomenology. Through photographic documentation, the work transforms ephemeral performance into a gazeable visual text, inviting viewers into a philosophical dialogue concerning existence, space, and corporeality.
The Body in Blue
2024
Multi-Media Installation 140*80*30cm
Moving Image 1’18”loop
The Tent
2024
Multi-Media Installation 200*200*90cm
Moving Image 5’07”
Textile, Graphic, Unreal Engine, Performance
The artist conducted a long-term third-perspective observation of her own dating life, integrating emotions into intimate spaces through poetic graphic narrative.
Using the method of integration in self-archiving and invoking psychoanalytic theories to parse the textual graphics, the artist attempts to find a connection between the environment and herself, thus removing the sense of dislocation and alienation caused by the dramatic environmental change.
In the process, the self-narrative paradox of hysterical discourse is revealed. The emotional stories symbolised by the structure are built into the in-between world. It actively interprets both the intimate space and the individual, isolating the individual from the environment, but at the same time reconstituting a new way of connecting the individual to the environment.
The tent, as part of the artist's body, becomes a daydream made of the body, but covering it, where the visible and the invisible happen simultaneously, interpreting the situation of the divided female subject. She exists in the city, she disappears in the city. It is grotesque and must be interpreted by others.
Sleeping in the wood
2024
Spatial Installation 200*200*200cm
Performance 30’00”
Textile, Performance, Materiality
In this experiment, the hidden explorations of a young girl toward the world—found within the kitschy, shiny, and time-specific objects of adolescence—are deciphered and overlapped with an ancient bedroom space, evoking a return to the protective enclosure within a chaotic familial environment. The stories buried within these spaces are unearthed, reinterpreted, and re-understood by the artist, ultimately touching upon a chaotic system of self-narrative.
“This one ball of concentrated past memories noisily screamed of the unconditional love I would never get and the desire to keep filling it. In the vast gaps of my self-narrative were my constant attempts to distance myself from my environment, my attempts to desire the impotence of being desired. It was the restlessness I kept feeling in my mind at work, my need to be safe, safer. I needed stable connection, more stable connection. In a large void, all the attempts I made driven by this force created a disconnect with my overall emotions, which leads to a very sad speculation: Maybe all the attempts I've made in the past have been useless”
At this point, the sphere that fuses past emotional stories and intimate space becomes part of the present environment, serving as the constant amidst change. As a result, the environment and space lose their importance. The artist rests within it, whether in the past or the future, now or elsewhere.
No.219
2023
Digital Collages Printed on Canvas 100*77cm*2pc
Semiotics, Cyborg, Digital Collage
ENo.219 is a diptych digital collage rooted in the research project Polyhedron: Exploring the Fluid Interplay Between Self, Identity, and Environment. It draws from the artist's personal experience of confronting and severing her own identity, depicting the repression and pain faced by women born in the 1990s within the constraints of East Asian culture. The work explores the subsequent alienation of their spiritual selves after prolonged exploitation by cultural dogma.
The artist reconstructs images using containers, frames, flowers, and gestures, connecting them through symbolic language. By employing a crystalline geometric approach, she forms a spiritual matrix—a cyborg-like embodiment—representing the fragmented and reshaped identity. Through a surrealist technique, the artist deifies the fractured subject, transforming it into a distant, enigmatic, and unapproachable new self-identity, creating a sense of alienation from the original self.
CSI;’‘’‘’‘’‘;’;/;;‘’/;‘;
2023
Moving Image 3’00”
Speculative Story Telling, Semiotics
Through a color-coded alert system, CSI categorizes behavior into three levels: green for normal patterns, yellow for behaviors that require further observation, and red for significant deviations that trigger reports to authorities. This algorithmic oversight of individual consumption highlights the growing power of surveillance in shaping and controlling personal habits.
CSI is an experimental video work that imagines a future where every sip of water is scrutinized, which based on the short novel SI (Iris Lingyu Zhang,2023). The system, using advanced behavioral detection technologies, categorizes individual drinking habits into safe, suspicious, or dangerous patterns based on data analysis. It creates a narrative in which the simple act of drinking from a cup becomes a key point of surveillance—a metaphor for how capitalist systems in consumer societies analyze and interpret the behaviors of targeted groups. Just as corporations use algorithms to track consumer choices, CSI envisions a world where personal consumption is constantly watched, ranked, and judged.
This work critiques how surveillance systems and capitalist interests encroach on everyday life, suggesting that people, under such scrutiny, may feel compelled to conform to “safe” patterns of behavior to avoid being reported. In this speculative future, individuals control their drinking habits to align with what the system deems acceptable, further illustrating how societal norms are dictated by the interplay of surveillance and authority. CSI reflects on how capitalist power dynamics invisibly manipulate personal choices in the name of safety and security.
A Punch on TOFU
2023
Moving Image 3’41”
Materiality, Sound Art, Graphics
The artist reconsiders the intertextual relationship between the interaction of gestures with materials and human interpersonal dynamics. By narrativizing silent objects, culturally rooted idioms are transformed into symbolic forms. The artist uses improvised performance as a way to revisit emotions, making subtle acts of emotional manipulation visible. Furthermore, the work explores the narrative power of sound, simulating dialogues, arguments, and the emotional dissipation that follows.
A Punch on TOFU reflects on the role of the visual in this process of degradation—objects become mere entities characterized by their transparency, the ease with which they can be managed and manipulated, and the cynical convenience of their domestication and exploitation. In the end, the object loses all power of resistance, which ironically is what defines its essence. Resistance is stripped away, reducing it to something entirely manageable.
© Iris Lingyu Zhang 2026