Samuel Zhang

Drawing on ethnographic research, community collaboration, and autobiographical inquiry, I position my practice between local specificity and transnational exchange. In recent years, this has driven a shift beyond static image-making toward spatial installation and expanded moving image, a transition that allows me to explore how architectural space and embodied experience physically manifest the weight of global histories and personal memories.

My work has been presented through exhibitions, screenings, and publications across the UK, Europe, and China, including New Contemporaries (UK), Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Festival, Brunei Gallery at SOAS, ESEA Contemporary in Manchester and so on.

Growing up in Shanghai during a period of rapid urban transformation, I became keenly aware that landscapes are never static, but continuously reshaped by infrastructure, political histories, and processes of circulation. This formative experience informed my understanding of mobility not as an abstract condition, but as something materially embedded within place. Later, training in photography and anthropology in London allowed me to expand this localised awareness into a cross-cultural methodology. Today, I leverage my own queer lived experience, not simply as an identity to be represented, but as a situated lens to unpack the complexities of identity transformation, queer diaspora, memory, kinship, and belonging.