Mengjiao Zhang, born in Suzhou, China, 1996. She attained her International Relation BA from Mount Holyoke College in 2018. From 2018, she starts pursuing a MFA in San Francisco Art Institute with a photography focus. Drawn to artifice, Mengjiao documents the changing in Chinese landscape, and zoos. Her work have been exhibited internationally.
They Don’t Speak Our Language
In becoming an artist I have learned you can appreciate and love a place but still question it at the same time. From childhood to adulthood, my point of view towards zoos changed completely. “They don’t speak our language” is a photographic project that looking at constructive landscape at the theme of zoo and animals. Through documenting spaces inside zoo, I begin conceptualize how people idealized animals, the living environment of animals, and to the extent of nature.
Through my photography I am learning the complicated relationship between nature/animal and human – it is contradictory of the zoos that preserving species and serving educational purposes, on the exchange of putting animals in cages – built by human, full of idealized interpretation.
To view more of Mengjiao Zhang’s work please visit his website.