DIRECTORY 2025

Ruiqi Zhang | Digital art

Ruiqi Zhang (b. Liaoyang, China) is a multimedia artist and educator who works with moving images, 3D assets, installations, and game engines to explore the complexity of emerging technology and computation as an alternative narrative container. His work highlights the ability of people today to read complex information and its impact on our daily lives while forming new modes of politics, aesthetics, and consciousness. Ruiqi's work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Times Art Museum (Chengdu, China), Imaginary Z Gallery (Hangzhou, China), Stove Works (Chattanooga, US), CICA Museum (Gimpo-si, Korea), The Anderson (Richmond, US), Towson University (Baltimore, US), Cardinal Space (Baltimore, US), and Thatalright Art Space (Taipei, Taiwan), and others.

Ruiqi Zhang's practice employs a meandering narrative approach to explore the themes of autonomy, confrontation, and imagination. As part of a generation that grew up with social media, his film and video installations focus on the sensitivity of digital technology when engaging with issues of Internet culture, online identity, media discourse, and critical surroundings. He considers short video platforms' recommendation mechanisms and their political and aesthetic attributes as a new montage structure that offers opportunities for reflection and the deconstruction of hegemonic power structures. By composing irrelevant visual materials, 3D assets, messy sounds, and meaningless text, his work aims to create a hybrid stimulus for surface reading. From the dazzling stream of information, he sees the potential for the disintegration of capitalism, allowing people to revert to daydreaming and gain insights through moments of distraction. In his recent practice, he further expands his interests in experimenting with art and algorithms, creating live simulation programs and infinite-duration videos using a game format. His creations contribute to a discourse that emphasizes playfulness, a sense of humor, and moments of respite, fostering a reading that transcends dualistic thinking to address changes in technology, politics, and modes of perception.

zhang-ruiqi.com
@zhangr6_