Ziyi Zhang: PIXEL//FLESH — Ziyi Zhang

We are pleased to present PIXEL//FLESH, a solo exhibition by Ziyi Zhang featuring her ongoing series of Data-Body Paintings curated by Jinyi Freya Xu at LATITUDE Gallery. Moving across painting, digital imaging, robotic fabrication, and sculptural relief, the exhibition examines how a technology acquires weight, texture, and bodily presence after leaving the screen.

The title PIXEL//FLESH names both a division and a point of contact. The double slash evokes a line of code, a rupture between systems, and a pathway through dimensions. On one side is the pixel: standardized, virtual, and weightless. On the other is flesh: tactile, organic, and subject to gravity. Like a portal ripped open, Zhang’s works force these two incompatible realms to collide.

Zhang’s practice begins with ordinary fragments from her immediate surroundings—a knitted sweater, a plastic shower curtain, metal wire, grass, or a chipped wall. These objects are uploaded into virtual space, where their distinct material qualities are flattened into the unifying code of pixels. Just as painting historically translated the visible world through pigment, the screen metabolizes these radically different forms of matter, rendering them temporarily equivalent as data.

Yet Zhang refuses to let the image remain within the frictionless architecture of the screen. Using robotic fabrication technology developed in collaboration with Canon Solutions, she translates digital images and three-dimensional meshes into topographical surfaces. These machine-produced structures are subsequently adjusted and painted by hand with oil pigment, pearl powder, epoxy clay, and other materials. The machine establishes the image’s architecture; the artist’s hand gives it friction, instability, and skin.

The resulting works hover between painting and technology. From a distance, they retain the visual seduction of digital images: luminous color and artificial sharpness. At close range, however, their surfaces begin to resist the screen’s promise of seamlessness. Pixels protrude from the picture plane. Gradients become ridges. Compression becomes texture. In this space, the robotic and the painterly do not fight each other; instead, they produce a hybrid form belonging entirely to neither system. As the image moves from object to data to physical relief, it acquires a distinct material presence.

Zhang describes this condition as a form of “screen-native materiality”: matter shaped by the visual logic of digital technology but no longer confined to the digital realm. Her Data-Body Paintings do not present the physical and virtual as opposing worlds. Instead, they reveal how deeply the two have already entered one another. The screen reorganizes our perception of physical matter, while matter exposes the limits of the screen’s apparent perfection.

The exhibition therefore asks what “flesh” might mean in a screen-mediated world. It is not limited to the biological body. Flesh becomes any surface capable of carrying sensation, pressure, memory, and transformation. Polymer becomes flesh. Pigment becomes flesh. In leaving the screen, the pixel gains depth, weight, and friction. It becomes flesh.