Art student Bob Zhang ’23 has been able to exhibit his passion for art and architecture through his current showcase in the Reed Art Gallery. The exhibition is on display until December 2 and is heavily based on the intersections of visual art and architecture.
Zhang is passionate about architecture, especially within art, because “the architecture isn’t complete without people.” He explained, “You have to have people that interact with each piece of architecture to give it life, and it’s an art form that considers its client…And I think that part of it is really interesting because it can have a lasting impact on [the artists].”
In order to pursue and improve his skills as an artist, Zhang has been working in the Oogie Art Studio in New York City. Although he has been working there since winter of his freshman year, due to COVID, he has only started going back regularly since Thanksgiving of 2021. He has returned to the studio during most of his holiday breaks to work on his art portfolio, and most of the artwork that he has exhibited in the gallery was created in that studio.
Architecture Teacher David Payne has had Zhang as a student in his classes since his sophomore year and identified one of his strengths as an artist to be “his drive.” Mr. Payne said, “[Zhang] could take this model here and work on it for the rest of his life, you know, continuing to improve it. I think that’s what really separates him: the desire to keep working and keep making things better, rather than just settling and saying, ‘okay, I’m done.’”
However, Zhang’s journey with architecture has not always been a smooth one. One of his pieces, Correspondence, is a collection of letters and exchanges Zhang had with his father and his initial reluctance to support his passion for architecture. In recent times he has become more accepting and is in support of his passion. Although pursuing a career in architecture may be difficult, Zhang stated, “I think it has its merits where you go into this field that requires you to go learn a lot of other stuff.” He continued, “It’s almost like taking architecture itself and also getting a full range of education, so that even if I don’t become an architect, I have a lot of other opportunities built in.”
When asked why he decided to create this exhibition, Zhang states that he was inspired by classmate Lily Lin’s ’23 own student artist exhibition. He then reached out to Visual & Performing Arts Teacher Tim Trelease about his interest. It has taken months to accumulate his pieces and put together the actual displays. There were many factors that went into planning the exhibition, but specifically, Mr. Trelease mentioned that “palette was also something that we really had fun thinking about.” He said, “we were able to kind of calibrate those [colors] together and just create a really nice flow for the viewer.”
Although time spent varies from piece to piece, Zhang noted that Recuperation (featured in the picture on the right) took him an upwards of three weeks over the summer, while working for an average of eight hours a day. Each piece of the work, no matter how small, required precision and care, and initially, Zhang said that he even drew out each individual brick of the wall by hand before cutting them out one by one.
Creating Recuperation, not only required ample time and skill, but Zhang also drew on experiences from his personal life in the process. Zhang believes that his experience living both in China and New York was necessary for him to create this piece. Although at first glance the work may resemble The Great Wall of China, Zhang mentioned that it was also inspired by Highland Park in Chelsea, New York City, the overgrown train track that was converted to a park.
Zhang noted that “they kept a lot of the overgrown sections to incorporate a part of the natural beauty of the train track.” He said, “I took this idea and recognized it in China, specifically the North of Beijing. Many people think of the Great Wall as a touristy place, but the Great Wall itself is so long that there’s sections of it that are left to overgrown and to decay. I thought it’d be interesting to apply that to Highland Park and create a mountain retreat type [building] up there, which is really interesting.”
On top of his showcase being a mix of art and architecture centered around his experiences, Zhang wanted it to be an exploration of both concrete evidence and abstract ideas. This led to some trouble because most of his ideas such as the scenery in his paintings or the walls in his structures were tangible. However, he was able to create a piece called Time, an abstract blue translucent sculpture. Zhang elaborated, “[Although] the actual execution of the piece itself was pretty quick, the thought process itself took the same amount of time as actually creating the piece. After many sketches and a bout of artist’s block, Zhang was able to reset by taking some time off and switching his focus to a different project. Additionally, his teacher from the studio was able to assist him by showing him some of her works from college. Zhang holds Time close to his heart because of the variety of interpretations that it allows its viewers. There was a moment when he was photographing his sculpture that Zhang changed the orientation of the figure, thus impacting the interpretations of the piece by different audiences. Zhang concludes that, “By making that abstraction, it allowed me to explore the idea that different people think differently, and I think that that is something that ‘concrete art’ is not able to do.”