Meet Zhi Wei (丘治伟), a Singaporean artist now based in New York City. They are carving a unique niche in the world of contemporary art through their distinctive photographic practice, delving into the transformative qualities of everyday objects. Recently, they have taken a break from image-making to focus on crafting custom silver jewellery and sculpture. Zhi Wei discusses with CNTRFLD the conceptual backbone behind these works. As they plan a prolific first half of the year, they envision creating both contemporary art and silver pieces seamlessly fitting into the design world.

CNTRFLD. Can you describe a little about yourself, your childhood, and how you came to pursue a career as a contemporary artist? What was your journey to becoming an artist, and were there pivotal moments or influences that shaped your artistic identity?

ZW. Like many others, my move to New York was motivated by a desire for transformation. After some years moving in this direction, I realized that I needed to look forward and back simultaneously, to find the grounding I needed to prevent myself from becoming unmoored.

I think that the moment I began to acknowledge the depth of my cultural heritage was when I began to make work that I could call distinctly mine. There are two key biographical details that I now consider to be intrinsic to my identity.

My grandparents were refugees from Meixian, Guangdong, arriving in Singapore on a boat. We’re Hakka, an ethnic group defined by geographic dispersal. Unlike most other Han Chinese sub-ethnicities which derive their names from a geographic region, the name Hakka translates, literally, to “guest people”.

I did not grow up immersed in what one might consider high culture. My father is a salon hairstylist, my grandfather was a street noodle seller. I didn’t know it at the time, but being raised in this environment has shaped the contours of how I view my practice. I believe that there is an inherent artistry to providing essential services to a small community with little need for popular affirmation, while making decisions that value personal agency over accumulation of wealth.

CNTRFLD. Tell us about your experience living and working in New York City. How does the city's dynamic environment differ from other places you've lived, and in what ways has it shaped your artistic vision and approach?

ZW. Singaporean society tends toward conformity and homogeneity. Fine cultural details are smoothed over and erased in service of creating a streamlined national narrative.

Living in New York implies proximity to a wealth of social, ethnic, and cultural subgroups, each of which assert their distinct identities through a range of signifiers, including the subtleties of dressing, spoken language, small architectural modifications to dwellings, all adapted to fit within an American context and framework. The ability to observe such a range of experiences just by moving through the city never ceases to amaze me because of its opposition to the environment I spent the first 20 years of my life.

My ability to exist comfortably in one space is guaranteed by my ability to move freely to the other. What I find comforting about a space can quickly become alienating, and vice versa. This movement through mental and physical opposites is central to my work.

CNTRFLD. From your perspective, how has Asian arts influenced today's culture over the years, and what is your opinion on the importance and impact of this movement in the global artistic landscape?

ZW. I come back a lot to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The vast majority of his films were made in his native Khon Kaen, a hyper-specificity that reads, to me, as a gesture of love.

They elegantly weave together threads in Thailand’s religious and political history as a base layer of meaning. The thread of how the film might be read by a Thai audience attuned to these sensibilities does not detract from a second parallel reading by those ignorant of these references.

So much of our artistic vocabulary and critical framework is rooted in Western thought. I think that truly impactful work from non-Western contexts must expand the cultural lexicon while being empathetic, not alienating, to their point of origin.

CNTRFLD. We’d love to hear more about your transition in mediums. Your photographic practice has evolved from capturing moments to working with silver. What inspired this transition, and how has it influenced your artistic perspective? How do these mediums complement each other, and how does a multimedia approach enhance the narrative you wish to convey in your art?

ZW. The fundamental limitation of image-making is the picture frame, typically a rectangle. For me, the existence of the image as object over time, including how the paper and its frame warps and deteriorates, is as important to me as the content or subject. I realized I was more interested in the process of following a single image through the world in its physical form, charting the changes in its meaning in relation to context and time. So, I found no reason to limit myself to image-making.

Sculpture, in the form of jewellery, was the next logical step. I was interested in working closer to bodies, in making portable carriers of meaning that could move through the most intimate and public of settings. While making jewellery comes with its own set of constraints, they make more sense to me than those of images. Jewellery allows me to construct a personal language that is less dependent on pre-existing objects in the way that image-making can be.

CNTRFLD. Your photographs have been described as notes and records of the visceral nature of a temporal moment. How do you capture and translate these qualities into your work, especially considering the shift to silver and custom pieces in the process of forming jewellery?

ZW. My process of making jewellery requires sustained attention to the effect of a single action or gesture. I adapt what would usually be considered a mark of imperfection into a core design element.  I often push materials to the point of near collapse in order find the perfect level of imperfection. This is a process that requires sustained attention to the material in liminal states of being. To relate this to my work in the darkroom, it’s like how making the decision to wash a print improperly reveals in silver granules being exposed on its surface, which also diminishes the archival quality of the print.

I’m interested in making objects that use elements like weighted extrusions and sharp edges to focus their wearers’ attention on their body. And so, it’s a pleasure to hear someone who wears my jewellery say that they never remove a piece from their body, or that it makes them move their bodies in more emphatic ways, because that implies a heightened level of attention to the temporal moment, or an augmentation of the self.

I think about my hands a lot, I’ve come to realize that, hypothetically losing sensation in my hands would be a far greater loss than losing my sight. Even when I am working mainly in the darkroom, I find myself intrigued by the muscle memory that results from repetitive full-body movement in near darkness, I now wonder what it would be like to work with wax in blindness.

CNTRFLD. In your photographic practice, you explored how objects in our environments can acquire a talismanic quality. Could you elaborate on the significance of this exploration and how it manifests in your current works?

ZW. I grew up around a lot of religious talismans. Seeing these talismans carried on bodies in urban contexts is, to me, a reminder of a base human need to find comfort and express desire through our relationship to objects. I’ve always been drawn to them for their aesthetic properties, while reading the range of metaphysical properties that a talisman allegedly holds as a reflection of the inherent workings of a culture, and the often-outmoded systems of thinking that they perpetuate. For me, considering this is a great way to break out of binary modes of thinking.

I have a broader personal definition of talismans. They are memories, both cultural and personal, externalized into material form, hedges against forgetting and reminders of corporeality.

I’m interested in what happens when I shift these objects and associations into constellations that generate dissonance. Working with jewellery is obviously an ideal way to tap into these narratives.

CNTRFLD. You mentioned participating in two group shows in 2023. Could you share more about the themes or concepts explored in these shows, and how your work contributes to or contrasts with the overall narrative?

ZW. The work in these shows are attempts to resolve my discontents with the nature of image-making: the rectangular picture-frame, and how I was more interested in charting the changing meaning of a single image over time.

A single image makes an appearance in both shows. I consider this image the foundation stone of my practice. Made by my uncle, the only other visual artist in the family, it depicts three sculptures in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, decapitated and limbless because of looting. Because the negative has been damaged by fungus, every print I have ever made contains these imperfections. However, if you were to visit Angkor Wat today, the statues themselves look almost exactly as they did half a century ago, when this photograph was taken. You’d be able to make an identical photograph, except without the aged quality of mine. I’m thinking about how this ideal point, in a sense of conservation, is almost arbitrary. There have been no efforts to restore these statues, probably because that would not mesh with our mental ideal of these statuary in a suspended state of ruin. Yet this state of conservation is also contingent upon wider cultural forces, as the repatriation of these looted parts is an ongoing process that has its own rules and logic.

The first presentation of this work was in Oraculo, the first show of Aro, a curatorial project by Enrique Garcia and Isabel Legate. Enrique and Isabel were initially interested in a series of four photograms I had made in 2016, made by exposing photosensitive paper to the light of burning sticks. They were about creating intentionally illogical uses of ritual objects and the property of light.

In Untitled (Rinse), seven rephotographed prints of the image from Angkor Wat were left in a standard 4x5 print washer left to run for the duration of the show, which eventually disintegrated the surface of the paper by the flow of water. This piece was shown alongside Untitled (Ovum), a series of four sculptures in sterling silver with chemical residue from soldering left on their surface.

In all three works, I either omitted a step that would create a state of permanence in the work, creating a personal definition of a finished state, or chose to extend the application of the process delineated in the step to an illogical conclusion.

Several months later, I presented the same four silver sculptures from Aro, this time laid on three dye-sublimation aluminium prints of the image from Angkor Wat. This work was shown in Conduit, a show I organized with Maite Iribarren Vasquez and Josie Bettman in Maspeth, Queens, a liminal space through which goods and services that sustain the functioning of the city flow. We used verse 11 from the Tao Te Ching as an epigraph:

            Thirty spokes join at one hub.

            emptiness makes the cart useful.

            Cast clay into a pot.

            the emptiness inside makes it useful.

            Cut doors and windows to make a room.

            emptiness makes the room useful.

            Thus, being is beneficial,

            but usefulness comes from the void.

Working with the same material in a different configuration mirrors the shifting utility of jewellery. Heirloom jewellery with personal, sentimental value also holds monetary value, the latter typically remains latent. In times of war, the sale of jewellery, literally for their weight in gold, can become a determinant of survival. In the context of looted cultural artefacts, however, valuation is far more arbitrary and functions more like a financial instrument.

I’m thinking about my objects in relation to palimpsestic quality of the negative and the image, accumulating layers of meaning over time that are revealed or concealed in varying combinations depending on the context, like sediment in a riverbed.

CNTRFLD. Taking a technical break from image-making is a significant shift. How has this break influenced your creative process, and what new perspectives or challenges has it introduced?

ZW. Defining myself solely as a photographer meant that my experience of reality was primarily mediated through the possibility of making images. In making a conscious decision to pause, I was able to create the space necessary to conceive of new ways of relating to the world. In my studio, I adopt an active, generative frame of mind, while I tend toward moving through the world in a passive, observational state.

I now prefer to use the term image-maker as opposed to photographer, as it implies that the process of making images does not have to be lens-based.

CNTRFLD. You mentioned working on silver pieces that would exist more comfortably in the design world. How do you balance the artistic and functional aspects of these pieces, and what considerations come into play when creating work for a design-oriented audience?

ZW. The difference lies in purity of intention. With design, my work is edited based on aesthetic coherence of the final product. There is no need for each decision and deviation to be accounted for, it doesn’t concern me if the final form of the piece is far from my initial conception of the work. The function of the object can be the sole justification for its existence.

It’s a loose set of rules that is based around my engagement with the material. Like so many other points I’ve touched upon, I don’t think my work in design could exist without my work in art. Each fulfils a desire that the other cannot.

It’s also intriguing to see what happens when work initially intended as design is adapted to suit art contexts through a series of gestures. The silver sculptures I showed in Oraculo began as jewellery, with the properties of wearability and surface lustre removed, shown in a state that reveals the process of making.

CNTRFLD. Looking ahead, what are your plans for the first half of this year in terms of producing more work in the art sphere? Are there specific themes or projects you're excited to explore?

ZW.  The work I presented in 2023 is the foundational text of the conceptual threads I’m interested in. In the same way that I ran up against the constraints of what photography could do for me, there are so many layers of meaning packed into each of these pieces that need to be unravelled for clarity. I’d say that this is what my work this year will be about.

Design Dysphoria

Brooklyn, NY 11237

Opening: May 17th, 7pm - 10pm

By appointment until May 25th

About Zhi Wei.

Zhi Wei Hiu trained in analogue photography processes. They treat the practice of making and printing images as a sensuous process that places the body in correspondence with the materiality of the image. 

Using silver, wax, and glass, they explore alternative methods of image-making. They meticulously engage with the unique physical properties of each material, aiming to enhance the resonances that emerge from juxtaposing disparate materials, forms, and gestures.

In their work, they seek to magnify and stabilise the resonances that arise when incongruous materials, forms, and gestures are delicately combined.

While crafting objects for both personal adornment and spatial decoration, they contemplate the historical and cultural significance of ornamentation in relation to self-expression. They view ornamented objects as essential extensions of the body and layered vessels for conveying meaning.

CREDITS:

Portrait photo of Zhi Wei by Maxwell Runko, illustrated by Maria Chen

ALL WORKS:

© Zhi Wei

1. Untitled (Angkor), 2023

Sterling silver and dye-sublimation print on aluminium

2. Detail of Untitled (Angkor), 2023

3. Untitled (Rince), 2023

4x5 print washer and 7 direct positive prints

4. Detail of Untitled (Rinse), 2023

5. Untitled (Ovum), 2023

Sterling Silver

6. Installation view, Oraculo, Mexico City 2023

7. Untitled, 2016

8x10 silver gelatin print, ash

8. Studio process, 2023-2024

9. Trio of earrings for Val, 2022

10. Sterling silver and moonstone rings for SGP and Karen, 2023

11. Studio process, 2024

12. Ring for Kento, 2023