Hard Containers

the projects Hard Containers and Human Sized Things combine the experiences of Ran Zhang's distant industrial metropolitan childhood in China and those of her current daily life through image making. Born as the second child during the one-child policy era, Zhang would lie awake every afternoon in the bed of her local community childcare centre, chasing an eye floater (shadows of tiny structures of cell debris projected onto the retina) that smeared the spotting of her hometown textures into an emotive drive while eternally darting away from her vision. Decades later, Zhang looks at her current surroundings under a microscope on a daily basis, and the same eye floater shape-shifts the novel surfaces with recollected textures. These ocular sediments are transcribed into the textures of the acrylic glass on which molecular structures of rhodopsin and myosin proteins are layered and laser engraved in the works. The projects use the depiction of the eye floaters as a ‘placeholder’ to convey an unconventional connection between emotions and scientific knowledge, and take the material aspects of knowledge to speak about the notion of a conditioned brokenness and chronically intense emotions that arise during life’s crises.

Hard Containers 5

eye floaters embedded in micrograph coated acrylic glass with engraved rhodopsin and myosin proteins
52.5 x 26,5 x 2,5cm
2024
(photograph: Trever Good)

Hard Containers 6

eye floaters embedded in micrograph coated acrylic glass with engraved rhodopsin and myosin proteins
84 x 26,5 x 2,5cm
2024
(photograph: Trever Good)

Hard Containers 7

eye floaters embedded in micrograph coated acrylic glass with engraved muscae volitantes, rhodopsin and myosin proteins
96.5 x 26,5 x 2,5cm
2024
(photograph: Trever Good)