Kitchen Talk 02
sharon-zhangxinran.com
Introduce yourself, list three things we need to know about you or your practice.
My dad named me Sharon because it sounds like my Chinese name Xinran. Oldest child in the family. Double Cancer.
What’s your creative process?
Contradictions between materials and concepts are fundamental to me, and I keep feeling like a translator between mediums. With paintings, the image-making process is intuitive but the execution is strategic.
Some works are brilliant because they look fantastic in a PDF, while the others are brilliant because you know exactly what it’s trying to do…
All my work is about tension and deadlines. If I could articulate it I wouldn’t be making art.
What factors have influenced your creation?
Fear of running out of time. Medicine by Ottessa Moshfegh. Anger. 孽子(白先勇). 尼克松回忆录. 食草家族(莫言), Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata.
How does your medium govern your artistic practice?
I’m not planning to commit to anything.
What’s a standard studio day for you?
I work on two to three different canvases at once. Objects are tricky with experiments and tests, these days I try to do both at the same time and failing miserably.
Personal experience vs. work?
What’s been on your mind lately?
Affairs, Absinthe by Nasomatto (perfume), Biographical Desire, Cashews, Death, Emails, Frantic (1988), Giftgiving, Heat, Inscribed Initials, Julio Cortázar, Kafka on the Shore (both the book and the perfume by FOLIE À PLUSIEURS), Le notti di Cabiria (1957), the Last Days of Disco (1998), Mia Goth, Nodules in my body, Nintendo 3DS, Night walks in a familiar city, Prodigy, Plans, Plastics, Questions, Rules, Summers, Streets in Pudong, The Cook, The Thief, His wife & Her Lover (1989), Tiptoeing around the dinning table, Udon, Vows, my middle school boyfriend’s Mother.
How’s life outside of studio?
Most days I’d like to imagine myself creating works in a vacuum.
Share one favorite item of yours.
I’ll share two.
Orange Maureques by Chopard
Venise by Diptyque
Plans for the future?
I try not to think about the future, all is temporary.
What do you most desire?
Education.
And finally, how do you like your eggs?
hardboiled.
Sharon Xinran Zhang (b. 2002, Beijing) is an artist based in Chicago, Illinois and Shanghai, China. She is currently earning her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.