Dashen Zhang

About

Dashen Zhang, a Chinese artist, currently lives and works in London and Jinan. His work continuously explores the ontology and history of photography, using images as his primary medium while simultaneously investigating photography as a subject, connecting historical narratives and personal emotions.

A Way to Measure the Universe

This work explores how photography can act not just as a recording device but as a way of sensing and interpreting the world. A vintage lens marked in imperial units disrupted my usual metric-based understanding, revealing how easily systems of measurement—so often seen as objective—can become unstable.

By overlaying mechanical diagrams of camera parts onto landscape images, I deconstruct the camera as a purely technical tool. Instead, it becomes a symbolic object—a mediator between logic and intuition, structure and emotion.

The image is not just the end product, but a trace of perception shaped by both the body and the machine. Through this process, I treat photography as a form of metaphysical inquiry: a space where the limits of precision open toward ambiguity, and where visual understanding is formed as much by feeling as by form.

The work invites viewers to reconsider how tools—scientific, spiritual, or mechanical—shape the way we measure, experience, and give meaning to the world around us.

A Thousand Pictures From Home

In the digital age, memory carriers exist in a paradox: they are immortal yet fragile. Digital photos never fade, yet a single accident can erase them forever. Their undying nature often resembles a passive curse—untouched, unseen, and ultimately forgotten.

Most digital images hold meaning only for their creators and vanish into obscurity after their passing, cursed with a hollow immortality. Seeking permanence, we extract moments from time, yet even the most stable data rarely outlives its maker.

To explore this contradiction, Dashen printed 1,000 digital photos of his hometown and assembled them into a traditional Chinese armour—symbolic yet useless in defence. It reflects the absurdity of entrusting impermanent materials with eternal digital ghosts, both destined to perish in their own ways.