Safer at Home: Conversation with Brenda Zhang (Bz)

Please join for the third in a series of conversations with contemporary artists as part of the ongoing online exhibition, Safer at Home. For this conversation, curator Alexis Bard Johnson will speak with artist Brenda Zhang (Bz) about their ongoing painting projects.

Brenda Zhang (Bz) is an interdisciplinary visual artist and architectural designer who makes paintings, sculptures, installations, and architecture and is currently based on Tongva land (Los Angeles, USA). In their practice, they are interested in sincerity as armor, physical and cultural construction as entangled processes, and the ongoing practice of translation as a deep inquiry into how power and narrative shape one another. As a queer femme Chinese-diasporic artist, they construct new narratives through intentional misreading, misalignment, hiding in plain sight, and an extreme attachment to certain objects. Bz is a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES, a spatial design collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Currently, they are the architectural assistant to Lauren Bon at the Metabolic Studio, as well as a participating artist in Gray Area Foundation’s 2019—2020 Experiential Space Research Lab. They hold a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University.

They are currently working on two series. The first, “Sometimes forever,” started in 2017 and is an ongoing portrait series. The second is new works that feature inanimate daily or household objects including cones, plants, and stanchions. Their paintings feature saturated colors, thick and thin drip lines of paint, and bold outlines that lend each canvas its own energy and feeling. To view more of their work and the rest of the Safer at Home Exhibition, click HERE. 

Image: A View from the Easel, 2020. Courtesy of the Artist.