Jiahui Zhang

Media Arts & Sciences and Neuroscience major

As a scientist and artist, I love to grapple with the scale and vastness of the human experience. Inspired by science fiction, I recontextualize biological phenomena and how they have informed my views on humanity's memory and relationship to one another through drawing and watercolor. The immediacy of drawing and painting in two dimensions speaks to me as the most direct expression of my craft; it invokes the rush of recording and collecting fleeting things, the humility of knowing not all can be captured.

Dog-eared

watercolor and colored pencil on paper

The Zebra (斑马)

colored pencil, book board, string

all work in the Jewett Gallery

two vertical installs on a white wall; the left is a series of 5 watercolor-style drawings of vaguely biological forms, getting progressively more cut and curled as they go down; at right are hanging spiraled forms

In my work, Dog-eared, I play with the two-dimensional world of paper, forming it into the third dimension through ripples and folds, evoking the cyclical nature of life. Similar to a thoroughly loved book, the works take on a life of their own as time passes. It is an artwork growing out of itself, escaping its home dimensions, and aching for me.

a vertical stack of 5 drawings on a white wall; each showing watercolor-style biological imagery and each getting progressively more cut and curled as they go down

three vertically hanging forms made of paper cut and curled into spiraling arch shapes; they are white on the outsides of the curves and colorful nature photographs inside

looking up a white wall at cut and curled watercolor drawings

watercolor drawing of something that might be a cuttlefish eye but is not entirely clear; one corner and a tiny part of the top edge are cut and curled

watercolor drawing of something that might be a cuttlefish eye but is not entirely clear; the top right and bottom left corners are strongly cut and curled

close up view of two white boards with strips of paper variously attached and curled to either side

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