Wen Zhang

The body has its own time.

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body serve as the primary material for thought and expression, rather than illustrating the ideas. Historically, performance art has held a precarious place in contemporary art: often celebrated in hindsight, yet underfunded and only selectively supported by institutions. This marginalization has not impacted all artists equally. Certain groups—women, people of color, older artists, and those with non-normative bodies—have faced greater exclusion from the archive, making their work less visible, harder to collect, and easier to overlook. For artists who identify with these groups, working in performance means continually navigating this contradiction.

For me, performance is not just a specific art form, but a direct exchange between the body and time. My body experiences time’s shifts, sometimes rising, sometimes falling. The richness of performance can’t be fully captured in video, text, or images. What has mattered most to me during these two years at RISD is presenting the work and shaping my ideas through that process.

As a woman artist, I notice that our inner experiences often drive embodied practice further than anticipated. My body is my original language, yet I’ve frequently overlooked it. With age, the effects of time on my body have become unavoidable, felt both within my own life and from society’s expectations of women in midlife. This urgency now feels immediate and real.

When I began asking where that pressure comes from, the work came with it.

Nails
2024
Live performance documentary video work, 8 minutes 57 seconds

Nails are everyday industrial objects—small, sharp, and often overlooked. In large numbers, their silver surfaces appear almost beautiful, yet scattered across the floor they become dangerous and capable of wounding the body. In this performance, walking across nails becomes a negotiation with pain, fear, and vulnerability, reflecting the pressures many women experience between outer composure and inner struggle. Through minimal materials and direct action, I make internalized pain visible, exploring endurance, resistance, and survival.

Dyed by Time
2025 
Performance and experimental moving image, 10 minutes 28 seconds

I dyed a dress and then went into the sea. Over and over, I took it off, washed it, put it back on, took it off again. It never came clean. For me, the work is about time as a stain — once time has touched the body, no amount of water can rinse it back out.

Hourglass 7.13’
Video installation, image installation, and live performance.
Performance and experimental moving image

My work centers on the female body as a space of lived experience and negotiation. Through video, performance, and installation, I explore reproductive anxiety, hormonal shifts, intimacy, and the subtle violences within caregiving. Using laundry baskets and old clothing as props, I create distorted bodies through video editing and sound design. Ultimately, I examine how women’s bodies, shaped by biology yet full of agency, become tools of both resistance and care, while everyday life opens new ways of thinking about freedom and caregiving.
 

Burning
2026 
Experimental moving image, 3 minutes 26 seconds

On a rainy evening, I tried to burn the ultrasound images of a lost pregnancy. The rain wouldn't let the fire catch easily. The whole thing took longer than I expected. The work is the time of that not-quite-letting-go — the body trying to perform an ending that the weather, and maybe I, kept refusing.

The body has its own time
2026
Video sculpture, experimental moving image, 4 minutes 57 seconds

The third part of the Turning trilogy. This time, the whole body rotates on the commercial platform. I'm not performing anything; I'm just letting the machine do its work on me. The thing meant to make objects desirable ends up making the body strange.

The body has its own time
2026–ongoing
Video installation, image installation, and live performance series

This is the main body of work for my thesis. I take the same setup — me, on the commercial rotating platform — into very different places: the ocean, a forest, an unnamed entrance, a train station, Times Square, a park. Each space presses on me differently as I turn. The piece is about how the same gesture, repeated in different rooms of the world, becomes different each time. The space squeezes the body, and the body registers the squeeze.
 

I Had a Dream About Pregnancy by the Western Sea 
Photography series, archival inkjet prints

I made these on the beach at the Rhode Island School of Design. I wore a prosthetic pregnant belly and sat in the landscape, but in the photographs the figure is gone — only the background remains. It's a portrait series of an absent body, sitting somewhere between dream, geography, and a pregnancy I was only imagining.

Nails
2024
Photography, archival inkjet print

This is a studio photograph of the same act — my body crossing a floor of thumbtacks. The performance is gone, but the image keeps the moment when I was still suspended above them.