Today we’d like to introduce you to Eager Zhang.
Eager, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I am a graphic designer as well as a research-based visual artist. I was born and raised in mainland China and after I received my Bachelor of Engineering in Design, I relocated to Chicago for my Master of Fine Arts program. Now, I’m a full-time Assistant Professor in an art institute teaching courses on graphic design, interactive art and experimental practice. My most recent research-based projects explore nature and botany as a proxy for queer study, which will contribute into my solo show that will take place in Kansas City June 2022, as well as an LA-based project I am collaborating with algorithm engineers on digital humanity, linguistics and printmaking.
At the same time, I am the art director of my design studio OmensOmens. My studio works with clients from the US and collaborates with commissioners from Asian countries such as China, Japan, and more. My design works were featured on publications like ItsNiceThat, Tokyo Type Director Club, and Society of Typographic Art, just to name a few., I have also won multiple awards for my design works.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
As a non-binary woman, accepting my queerness is a special process for myself first, also it affects my relationship with family. As an artist, I blend my personal history and memory with “Queer Abstract”, which would be the description of an important subject matter among my wide practice. I investigate the realm of nature/knowledge, linguistics and the making of graphics as the proxy of my queer study. I wrote a lot, mostly poems — during my college years, I wrote in Chinese, and while I spent my time here during the pandemic, I started to write in both Chinese and English. A lot of things had happened during the first few months of the pandemic — I felt the geographical displacement between here and where I was born, also it was the time when I started to communicate with myself and my family about my queerness and the vulnerability of a body, the softness of my emotions. I made an artist book to render my thoughts and my writings into an experimental typography “visual game”.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I consider myself a person who is functioned with an architect’s mindset most of the time. Initially, I wasn’t trained as an artist. My origins of design, mathematics, physics and coding shaped me into an artist who is obsessed with structure, functions and linguistics. For me, those proxies are my non-binary voices: they’re not assigned with genders, and the language systems are pure, neutral and universal. That part of my background and my enthusiasm of “Queer Abstract” really boosted my practice.
A recent project I’ve been working with is a team project: I teamed up with my LA engineer cohort and we are working on a project to explore the possibility of digital humanity, an integrated project on “non-binary visual language” as a futuristic vehicle of liberal art through working with “Human-Intervened” Generative Adversarial Networks. I enjoyed the collisions we have experienced when making art and applying technology — being equipped with some science background is a privilege, and we already feel a lot of overlapping between printmaking art and generative computing art is happening. The collaboration is bringing our practice to the next level.
I am a systematic thinker. As a design educator in art institute, I teach typography design as a system, which is part of my teaching philosophy. Meanwhile, a designer’s personality with structured mind made me enjoy working with my clients as the systematic strategist or art director. I get the privilege to work with academic clients, non-profit organizations and indie artists, and those are the people that usually give me the biggest freedom to design with boldness.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
Covid-19 has not been a fun experience for most of us, but to some extent, it served as a motivator, urging me to expand my practice remotely and be global. I slowly got used to the new norm of working from home with people from all around the world. Sometimes it would be frustrating, as I have woken up in the morning and found out that my client in East Asia was trying to reach out at 3am. The whole ecology is also making changes slowly, allowing me to benefit from virtual resources which was once only available locally, but moved online. In this way, I am able to have very smooth communication with powerful collaboration tools with my West Coast partners.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: eagerzhang.com
- Instagram: @eagerzliterally
