Bio
Yuhan Zheng (b. 1999, Beijing) is a Toronto-based lens-based artist working with analogue and digital photography, as well as image transfer and manipulation. She received her BFA in Photography with Distinction from OCAD University in 2023. That same year, she was awarded the Gallery 44 Residency Prize, and has since exhibited at Gallery 44 in both 2024 and 2025. Her work was also featured on Shaw Street’s Public Art Billboard as part of the OCAD U × Critical Distance Career Launcher initiative, accompanied by a commissioned curatorial essay.
Artist Statement
Starting with performative self-portraits that explored the tension between indexicality and representation, I positioned myself as both subject and operator to question how digital culture constructs identity beyond essentialist boundaries. In response to AI-generated images that increasingly simulate photographic realism, I have turned to material processes that echo how memory fragments, distorts, and slips over time.
Working with archival family photographs, I transfer images onto unconventional supports—such as bamboo strips—then blur and partially erase them, interrupting the continuity of memory to expose its fractured, intimate, and abstract dimensions. The act of transfer—pressing, peeling, rubbing—is not merely technical. It becomes a physical negotiation with time and loss, where emotional residue registers as surface rupture.
Through this bodily engagement, the photograph no longer functions as representation but emerges as encounter: fragile, partial, and unresolved. By treating material as an active agent that intervenes in the image, I challenge photography’s indexical authority and reframe it as a site of instability—one that mirrors the ambiguity and volatility of memory itself.