The Swiss-Chinese artist on perception, diasporic identity, and reimagining the city through installation

CNTRFLD.ART speaks with Swiss-Chinese artist Jiajia Zhang on the occasion of her presentation at Singapore Biennale 2025: pure Intention, a city-wide exhibition that transforms Singapore into a platform for immersive, site-responsive contemporary art. Known for working across video, sculpture, photography, and spatial installation, Zhang examines how media, architecture, and everyday image cultures shape perception and blur the boundaries between public and private life. In this conversation, she reflects on how her Biennale work engages childhood perception, commercial visual language, and collective space, while tracing the deeper threads that run through her practice — diasporic memory, care, infrastructure, and the tension between analogue and digital worlds. Moving between personal narrative and broader social frameworks, Zhang reveals how her installations function as environments for reflection, inviting viewers to reconsider how cities are inhabited, remembered, and mediated. The dialogue situates her Singapore Biennale project within a wider trajectory of work that explores identity, translation, and spectatorship, offering insight into an evolving practice shaped by movement, observation, and the politics of everyday space.

“Being open to collisions between things that don’t obviously belong together has been crucial. Finally, I would say to hold on to curiosity, especially when it’s fragile or discouraged. Sometimes an image or an interest stays with you for years before it finds its form or its audience."—Jiajia Zhang

Singapore Biennale 2025 – Theme and Practice
CNTRFLD. Your work is part of the Singapore Biennale 2025, which is guided by the theme of pure intention and encourages audiences to engage with the city through immersive and site-responsive works. How does your contribution reflect this theme, and in what ways does it transform the audience’s perception of public and private spaces in Singapore?

JZ. My contribution engages with the theme of pure intention through questions of perception in public space, specifically from the perspective of a child. The sculptures take the familiar form of mascots but remove them from their usual commercial or retail context. I was interested in this shift—how a language of images that is normally instrumentalised for consumption can be reactivated in a more open, ambiguous way.

What intrigued me was thinking about how, prior to having children, I hadn’t paid close attention to this visual language in public space, nor to the kinds of emotional attachments children form to specific places, images, or figures in the city. These attachments are often driven by intentions we don’t fully register as adults. In that sense, the work reflects on multiple layers of intention operating simultaneously in public space —commercial, architectural, social, playful—and how we are not always conscious of them. I approached this reflection playfully.

The sculptures function as carriers for video works, most of which were shot in public spaces across the city. One video is composed entirely of found footage, which I think of as a kind of virtual public space—another site where language, imagery, and address are constantly being negotiated. Together, these videos open short, fragmentary narratives rather than fixed meanings.

Formally, the sculptures are abstracted and mirrored on one side, so they physically reflect the audience and their surroundings. Viewers find themselves caught between looking into the work—through these small narrative windows—and seeing themselves reflected, alongside other viewers. This creates moments of collision, where spectators become participants in a temporary, shared play.

Ultimately, the work speaks to different sides, forces, and intentions that coexist in Singapore’s public spaces, and to how these spaces are experienced differently by different audiences. By foregrounding play, reflection, and shifting perspectives, the work invites viewers to become more aware of how they inhabit the city—both collectively and individually.

Notable Past Work
CNTRFLD. Looking back at exhibitions such as You Left Something Behind at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and A FILM IN TWO PARTS, THE SECOND OF WHICH NEVER ENDS at Istituto Svizzero in Milan, how do you see your approach to blending public and private, analogue and digital, evolving over time?

JZ. Looking back, I see these exhibitions as moments where my practice became more explicitly shaped by lived experience and by the friction between different states of being. During You Left Something Behind at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, I was confronted with an extreme polarity between the public and the private. Preparing a museum exhibition is an intensely public act, but at the same time I had just given birth, which is perhaps one of the most domestic and private moments imaginable. That push and pull directly informed the work. It changed how I perceived the city and how I read its structures.

One piece from that period was based on the opening times of a restaurant I passed every day; those hours became a framework for translating my own nursing times. It was a way of thinking about visibility—about when a body is “open,” working, available, or withdrawn—and how these rhythms are mirrored or erased within public infrastructure and social expectations. It also opened up perspectives that are rarely acknowledged in public space, particularly around care and motherhood.

A FILM IN TWO PARTS, THE SECOND OF WHICH NEVER ENDS continued this inquiry, but through a more spatial and infrastructural lens. The installation was centred around bollards—objects that usually regulate public movement—placed on a carpet, collapsing the logic of the street into something domestic and intimate. The floor plan echoed a memory from my childhood, when my parents divided a large room with a cupboard, creating a semi-private space for me.

I was never fully included in the adult world, but never entirely excluded either. That condition of being adjacent, overhearing, and partially participating has stayed with me and continues to shape how I think about space and spectatorship.

Across both projects, there is also an increasing awareness of how analogue and digital modes intertwine. I move constantly between handwritten notes, phone recordings, found objects, and digital translations. This mirrors our everyday condition—shifting between bodily, physical needs and the abstractions of devices and networks.

Language itself now exists in both material and generated forms, and I’m interested in that contradiction: how intimacy, care, and memory are filtered through systems that are often impersonal or infrastructural. Over time, my work has become less about resolving these oppositions and more about holding them in tension—allowing public and private, analogue and digital, to overlap, leak into one another, and remain productively unresolved.

Early Life and Upbringing
CNTRFLD. You spent your early childhood in China with your grandparents before joining your parents in Switzerland. How did these formative experiences of transnational movement and separation shape your sense of identity and the way you engage with space and memory in your work?

JZ. My early childhood in China was shaped by a very collective way of living. I lived with my grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles in a kind of gated community where my two sets of grandparents lived at opposite ends of a park. I was constantly moving between their homes, drifting from one space to another. Each household had a very different atmosphere and educational style—one grandmother was extremely social, with a full house, many guests, and a strong sense of hospitality, while the other was stricter and more structured.

That movement between different environments taught me early on that space is never neutral. On the walks between the two homes, I had time to process and reflect on what I had just experienced, to form my own understanding rather than fully adopting one position or another. Beyond my family, many of the neighbourhood houses had open doors and a similar sense of welcome, which reinforced this idea of permeability—between private and shared spaces, between inside and outside.

When my parents left China, it didn’t feel traumatic to me at the time. In such a large, extended family structure, their absence didn’t register as a lack. The real rupture came later, when I travelled alone to Switzerland and was suddenly reunited with my parents, who had become almost strangers. Moving from a collective family structure into the intimacy of a nuclear family felt unexpectedly lonely.

I had to adapt to the rules, rhythms, and emotional world of just two people, which was a much bigger structural shift than the geographical move itself. This transition was compounded by the introduction of a new language and new social codes. In Switzerland, I became aware of tensions between different value systems— between home and school, private life and public expectations.

But by that point, I was already used to navigating contradictions. I had learned early on that reality is assembled from multiple perspectives rather than a single, stable narrative. That understanding continues to shape my work. I’m drawn to spaces that are transitional, layered, or incomplete — spaces where belonging is negotiated rather than fixed.

Memory, for me, is not linear or singular; it’s something that accumulates through movement, separation, and adaptation. These early experiences of transnational movement and shifting family structures taught me to see identity as something porous and constructed, and that sensibility continues to inform how I engage with space, language, and perception in my practice.

Identity and Artistic Perspective
CNTRFLD. Your practice often navigates the intersections of personal, cultural, and digital narratives. How do you see your own diasporic experience informing your artistic exploration of identity, and in what ways does it influence the themes you choose to address?

JZ. My practice usually starts from things that are very present in my everyday life—observations of my own behaviour, situations I find myself in, or moments of contradiction and uncertainty. These are not necessarily chosen as “themes” in advance; they tend to arise repeatedly through different constellations.

Having a diasporic background means that these kinds of tensions surface more often, or at least more visibly. You’re regularly confronted with questions of positioning, translation, and adjustment, even in very ordinary situations. For me, this becomes a way of seeing the world rather than a declared subject matter. It’s about moving through the city, observing scenes, fragments of language, gestures, or encounters, and collecting them almost intuitively. The work often emerges from this accumulation. Only later, through the process of making, do certain themes—identity, belonging, mediation, distance—become legible.

Because of this, my engagement with personal, cultural, and digital narratives feels embedded rather than illustrative. The diasporic experience informs how I access both physical space and narrative space—how I read a street, how I approach a text, or how I interpret an image. It brings with it certain structures of perception that aren’t consciously learned but formed through lived experience. Making work becomes a way of making these structures visible to myself.

Rather than starting with a fixed idea of what I want to explore and then applying it to the work, the process often works in reverse. The act of working reveals what has already been shaping my perspective. In that sense, identity in my practice is not a stable category but something that unfolds through observation, repetition, and making.

Diasporic Experience and Cultural Translation
CNTRFLD. In works like After Love, you juxtapose footage from China, Taiwan, and Europe to explore emotional and cultural translation across contexts. How do you approach representing diasporic perspectives in your work, and what challenges or opportunities does this offer in creating universally resonant experiences?

JZ. After Love began with a very small, almost accidental trigger. I came across a coxcomb flower at a market—one that immediately reminded me of my grandparents’ backyard. That image set off a chain of associations, including a VHS tape I had recently found. When I was growing up, VHS tapes were one of the primary ways families separated across countries stayed connected. Emails weren’t really an option yet, phone calls were prohibitively expensive, and letters were slow. These tapes became a form of emotional exchange.

What struck me when I revisited the footage was how performative and bittersweet it was. People would present the best version of themselves to the camera: dressing up, decorating their homes, singing songs, staging small performances. Music played a crucial role because it’s a universally understood emotional carrier. That’s why the film is structured around songs—karaoke evergreens, often English-language tracks that were popular in Chinese karaoke culture, even when the lyrics weren’t fully understood. Emotion travelled more easily than language.

The work moves between these intimate, private performances and larger, public ones by celebrities and cultural icons such as Teresa Teng, Leslie Cheung, and even Britney Spears. These figures represent a different scale of address—performing for mass audiences—yet their personal vulnerabilities and tragedies puncture the spectacle. Leslie Cheung’s funeral procession appears alongside references to his struggle with depression; Britney Spears’ case emerges in relation to familial surveillance and control. In both cases, there’s a tension between care and constraint—between the desire for someone’s well-being and the imposition of norms, expectations, and definitions of success.

This tension also extends beyond the personal. When I was working on After Love in 2019, the protests in Hong Kong around the extradition bill were unfolding. The dynamic between the “motherland” and Hong Kong—between protection and control, belonging and threat—echoed the familial dynamics in the film. I was interested in how similar structures appear at vastly different scales: within families, within celebrity culture, and within geopolitical relationships.

In representing diasporic perspectives, I don’t aim to explain or resolve these contradictions. Instead, I try to weave together fragments—private footage, pop culture, political context—allowing emotional translation to happen through proximity rather than through a single narrative. The challenge is that these experiences are deeply specific, but the opportunity lies in their emotional architecture. Feelings of longing, care, surveillance, and misalignment are widely shared, even if their contexts differ. By working through emotion, performance, and music, the work opens a space where personal and collective histories can resonate across cultural boundaries.

Support Systems in the Arts
CNTRFLD. Having lived, studied, and worked in multiple countries—China, Switzerland, Italy, and the US—what reflections do you have on the importance of institutional and informal support systems for artists? How have these shaped your own practice and opportunities?

JZ. Moving between these contexts made me very aware of how crucial both institutional and informal support systems are for artists—not just for visibility, but for the possibility of sustaining a practice over time.
Switzerland, in particular, has a very distinctive and robust ecosystem for artists. What I find remarkable is how support exists simultaneously at multiple scales: in small, self-organised, peripheral, or artist-run spaces, and in larger, state-supported institutions. I often think of it as a tree with many roots—the roots being just as important, if not more so, than the visible structure above ground. Even in very small cities or rural areas, you can find art spaces with serious intellectual rigour and international reach. That density and distribution of support is quite singular.

At the same time, this system comes with its own pressures. Many forms of support are structured through applications, competitions, deadlines, and juries, which can create a sense of constant comparison or competition. There is also the risk that certain narratives, aesthetics, or thematic trajectories become more legible or favoured within these frameworks, while other voices—equally complex or necessary—remain less visible because they don’t align with prevailing expectations.

That said, one of the strengths of the Swiss system is its consistency. Opportunities arise regularly, and visibility can grow over time rather than needing to happen all at once. I wasn’t widely visible until my late thirties, and I don’t think that would have been possible without a context that allows for long-term development. If you stay somewhere, work persistently, and engage with the ecosystem, there is a real chance for your work to gradually find its audience.

Beyond national structures, Switzerland is also deeply connected to international networks—through residencies, cultural institutes, and exchange programmes—which extends these support systems beyond its borders. This combination of local depth and global connectivity has shaped my own practice and opportunities significantly.

While no system is without its limitations, I think the key is maintaining a balance: supporting a diversity of practices while remaining attentive to voices that don’t immediately fit dominant narratives.

Current and Future Projects
CNTRFLD. Are there any upcoming projects or research areas that you are particularly excited about, either in terms of medium, location, or conceptual focus?

JZ. How do they build on or depart from your previous explorations of image, space, and public/private tension? I’m currently very excited about an upcoming solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York. The project takes the form of a video installation and is based on footage I shot last year in China together with my family—my partner, who operated the camera, and my daughter, who was very much part of the process. In many ways, the trip was about introducing her to where I come from: meeting close and distant relatives, moving through cities and infrastructures that shaped my own early experiences. Working as such a small, intimate team allowed for a different way of filming. It created a flexibility in how we navigated public space—how we observed buildings, streets, and everyday rhythms—while also acknowledging the presence of care, family, and vulnerability within those spaces.

The footage was conceived as part of a larger film project set across three locations: China, Switzerland, and the United States. China represents origin and extended family; Switzerland, the place where I live and work; and the U.S., where I encountered art education and a particular idea of artistic ambition. The Swiss Institute presentation focuses on the China chapter.
The film doesn’t follow a linear narrative. Instead, it’s structured around recurring motifs: rotating tables like those found in Chinese restaurants, which function as images of sharing, circulation, and collective negotiation; doors as symbols of access, entry, exclusion, and transition; and songs, which once again act as emotional and collective carriers. These elements form a loose grammar through which the viewer moves rather than a fixed storyline.

Showing this work in New York is particularly important to me. I’m interested in how cities like New York and major Chinese cities mirror each other in their visions of success and the “good life,” and how these ideals circulate globally through repetition and aspiration. At the same time, the film looks at what sustains these dreams: the invisible labour, the service economies, the people who maintain the image—taxi drivers, workers, infrastructures—often at the cost of their own time and bodies. There’s a constant oscillation between ambition and exhaustion, monumentality and fragility.
The project is also deeply personal. My family appears in the film, and my daughter’s presence introduces another temporal layer—thinking about inheritance, projection, and what it means to pass on both places and expectations. These intimate moments sit alongside reflections on empire, architecture, and collapse—how symbols like the Empire State Building can just as easily stand for ambition as for its undoing.

The installation includes a script written by Aurelia Guo, a writer whose work I deeply admire. Her text is composed of fragments drawn from different sources and reflects on architecture, success and failure, revolution, and contradiction. Rather than explaining the images, the text runs alongside them, creating another layer the viewer has to navigate. In this sense, the work builds on my ongoing exploration of image, space, and public/private tension, but it also shifts it. The viewer is constantly repositioned—between cities, between personal and collective histories, between image and text. Meaning emerges through these movements and is ultimately translated back into the space of the exhibition itself, asking viewers to reconsider their own positioning within cities and the global imaginaries that structure everyday life.

Chosen Base for Work
CNTRFLD. You currently live and work in Zürich. How does this base inform your practice, and what made this location particularly conducive to your artistic exploration compared to other cities you have lived in?

JZ. Zürich works for me as a base largely because of its functionality and stability. The practical conditions—childcare, a studio, a predictable rhythm—make it possible to work over longer periods of time. At the same time, when I’m in Zürich, I often miss many things from other places. The city is visually rich, but it’s not particularly clustered or complicated. There is less density, less friction, and very little of the detritus or disorder that can be productive or nourishing for thinking. Public space tends to be regulated, and spontaneous or unexpected forms of occupation are relatively rare. Compared to cities like New York, where different creative communities are constantly coming together, or cities in China, where public space can be used in very improvised and surprising ways, Zürich can feel visually and socially monotonous. That stability has its advantages, but it also creates a certain flatness. Because of that, it’s always refreshing to leave—for a residency, a show, or even a short trip.

Perspectives on Technology and Image Culture
CNTRFLD. Your work often engages with media saturation, social media, and the “intimate public.” How do you see technology shaping contemporary experience, and how do you navigate its pervasive influence while maintaining artistic and personal agency?

JZ. I experience technology as something deeply ambivalent. On one hand, there is a sense of flatness and monotony that comes from media saturation and a kind of over technological professionalism, where everything appears optimised, legible, and constantly available. On the other hand, these same conditions sometimes open unexpected possibilities—uses, connections, or forms of expression that aren’t fully predetermined. I don’t approach this as something to resolve.

The way I navigate these spaces personally—how I deal with attention, exposure, distance, and intimacy—often becomes part of the work itself. In that sense, the work is less a statement and more an attempt to think something through. By doing so, it potentially opens the same questions to an audience rather than offering answers.

Reading and working with the voices of others has been important in this process. In several works, I’ve used voiceovers by writers such as Heike Geissler or Lauren Berlant as a way of thinking alongside their texts rather than illustrating them. Their writing provides a structure or pressure point against which my images and edits can operate.

This approach allows for a form of agency that is not about control, but about positioning—bringing together existing texts, images, and technologies in a way that remains open. Ideally, the work doesn’t close in on itself but stays unfinished, continuing through the audience’s own associations, projections, and interpretations.

Advice for Emerging Artists
CNTRFLD. Given your interdisciplinary training and international trajectory, what advice would you offer to emerging artists who are seeking to explore similar intersections of media, public/private space, and diasporic identity?

JZ. My own trajectory has been quite winding. I was interested in art and language from a very young age, but that interest wasn’t necessarily encouraged. I was pushed toward more “practical” paths and ended up attending a high school focused on economics. At the time, my quiet form of protest was reading literature in class. Eventually, I found a compromise with my family by studying architecture, which sits somewhere between science and the arts. I think this kind of compromise is common, especially in Asian or diasporic family contexts, where pursuing art can feel uncertain or difficult to justify.

Because of that, I’m hesitant to offer advice in the form of a clear roadmap. If anything, I would say not to shy away from a complicated trajectory. Following your interests doesn’t always look direct or efficient, and it can be slow or draining at times. But those detours often carry information that later becomes essential to the work.

I also think it’s important not to feel pressured to already “know” what you’re doing or what your position is. For me, the work has always been about finding things out—paying attention to images, ideas, or questions that persist, even if they don’t immediately make sense or seem encouraged. Being open to collisions between things that don’t obviously belong together has been crucial.
Finally, I would say to hold on to curiosity, especially when it’s fragile or discouraged. Sometimes an image or an interest stays with you for years before it finds its form or its audience.

About the artist.
Jiajia Zhang is a Swiss-Chinese artist based in Zürich, working across video, photography, sculpture, and spatial installation. Trained in architecture at ETH Zürich and photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, she later completed her MFA at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in 2020. Her interdisciplinary background informs a practice that treats images as both material and environment, examining how media systems shape perception, behavior, and the boundaries between personal and public life.

Zhang approaches her work as a form of contemporary image archaeology. She assembles self-produced and found digital fragments — from everyday social media traces to mass-produced visual languages — into carefully constructed installations where seemingly minor or intimate elements intersect with broader social structures. Through these juxtapositions, she exposes the soft yet pervasive influence of media technologies and the standardized frameworks that organize movement, communication, and identity in rapidly evolving spaces.

Her installations often transform exhibition sites into layered environments where private and collective spheres overlap. Architectural gestures, linguistic systems, and familiar urban forms become points of entry into questions about how reality is mediated, archived, and speculated upon. The result is a tension between documentation and interpretation: a visual stocktaking of contemporary life that also highlights the constructed nature of perception itself.

Zhang’s work has been presented internationally, including at Fluentum in Berlin, Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard in Paris, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Nottingham Contemporary, FriArt Fribourg, Kunsthalle Zürich, and Istituto Svizzero in Milan, among others.

About Singapore Biennale
Set against this backdrop, Jiajia Zhang’s presentation unfolds within Singapore Biennale 2025: Pure Intention, the eighth edition of the Biennale, which transforms the city into a living platform for contemporary art. Spanning multiple neighbourhoods and everyday spaces—from the Civic District and Wessex Estate to Tanglin Halt, Orchard Road, and SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark—the Biennale brings together over 100 artworks and public programmes that invite audiences to encounter Singapore through immersive, site-responsive practices. Framed around rituals, histories, and lived experiences that shape shared environments, the Biennale encourages reflection on how cities are felt, inhabited, and imagined. As a key SG60 Signature Event marking Singapore’s 60th anniversary, it situates individual artistic voices, including Zhang’s, within a broader collective moment of looking closely at the city’s evolving identity and the connections forged through art.

The exhibition runs until 29 March 2026.
Venue: Gallery 1, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
39 Keppel Rd, #01-02, Singapore 089065