Evian Wenyi Zhang’s practice centers on a distinctive grid-based methodology that functions as a critical framework for examining the politics of seeing and the infrastructures that shape contemporary image consumption. By observing how arbitrarily selected categories of images—whether personal or socially functional—behave when processed through a system based on her own hierarchy of attention, she reveals how visual material is never merely aesthetic but always ideologically conditioned. Her method disrupts content-driven models of image circulation, tracing how appearances are instrumentalized for social, cultural, and political ends. 

Zhang’s approach resonates with the modernist grid identified by Rosalind Krauss in 1979, where the grid asserts a visual logic that rejects representation in favor of formal autonomy. She reinterprets this autonomy through the metaphor of a smoothie blender: the original fruit and the resulting flavor stand in for the content and appearance of an image—what exists before and after its passage through the grid. In Zhang’s work, the grid becomes a site where cultural representations are digested, fragmented, and recomposed into new visual forms. The “taste” that remains—her grid paintings—serves simultaneously as evidence and critique of how images are metabolized within broader cultural systems. 

From this foundation, Zhang extends her inquiry into other media such as photography and sculpture, which become personifications of the inherited visual regimes that have been filtered, concealed, and transformed through her process.

Evian Wenyi Zhang (b. 2000, Shanghai) lives and works in Berlin. She holds a BA in Art History from New York University. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2025), Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2024) and Lulu, Mexico City (2022). Her works were part of the group exhibitions at Société, Berlin (2025); OG Gallery, Istanbul (2025); Sister Galerie, Seoul (2024); Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2024); Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin (2024); Public Gallery, London (2024, 2023); Travesía Cuatro, Madrid (2023); Tara Downs, New York (2023); 69 Art Campus, Beijing (2024); and MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2021). Zhang’s work is in the collections of M Woods Collection, Beijing; and X Museum, Beijing.