Zan Wang
Zan Wang (b. 1997) is a professional artist and researcher based in London, UK. Currently, she is a PhD researcher in contemporary art and philosophy at Lancaster University. She completed her BFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2019 and her MFA in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021. Zan's practice explores trace, and ephemerality, and the demarcation and erasure of borders within landscape paintings. Utilising mixed media materials and cyanotype overlay painting, she investigates the multiplicity of awareness and internalised landscapes. Her work features motifs such as relics, stages, and windows, which act as boundaries and portals, offering a multi-layered exploration of space, time, and transformation. Over the past five years, Zan has exhibited in London, Lancaster, and Sheffield in the UK, as well as in New York and Baltimore in the US.
This cyanotype project consists of a series of cyanotype-based works on paper and fabric, exploring how layered transparencies influence a shift in perception within painting. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces deep blue images by exposing photosensitive surfaces to UV light. Objects—such as plants— placed on the surface create white imprints, preserving delicate details and shadows. This technique captures fleeting moments and natural forms, reinforcing the project’s exploration of capturing presence within absence.
The works investigate in-betweenness, a state of existence between two conditions, spaces, or identities— neither fully one nor the other, but occupying both simultaneously. Here, this manifests as an overlap between here and there, present and memory, space and place/home. Through layered transparencies, the paintings suggest an ambiguous, shared occupation of multiple realities at once.
Drawing from Chinese natural elements, the works incorporate local plants such as bamboo, ferns, and small shrubs from home gardens as cyanotype imprints. These botanical marks, layered and overlapping, create an ephemeral, semi-transparent presence—a ghostly suspension between a nostalgic imagination and the fleeting moments of everyday life experienced elsewhere.
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