Leah Zhang: Beeld Organised by Zhejun Gao
Leah Zhang, Beeld, 2024. Still. Courtesy of the artist
Join us on Friday, 22 May at Chisenhale Gallery for an evening of screening and conversation centred on the film Beeld (2024) by Amsterdam-based artist Leah Zhang. Organised by Zhejun Gao, our Curatorial Research Fellow at Chisenhale Gallery, this programme forms part of his ongoing curatorial research into the displacement of cultural objects and the shifting conditions through which they are made legible.
Conceived as a companion to Zhejun's presentation Beichen Zhang: New Exorcist at Asymmetry, the event extends his wider enquiry into the unstable lives of objects as they move across geographies, institutions, and systems of mediation. If New Exorcist follows the afterlives of Pazuzu across museum, film, and consumer culture, Beeld attends to another itinerant object: a Chinese Buddhist statue acquired by a Dutch collector in 1996 and later revealed to contain the thousand-year-old mummified remains of a monk.
Moving through hospitals, museums, and private storage, Leah Zhang’s film stages a series of encounters around the sculpture, tracing how it is apprehended, narrated, and transformed by those who come into contact with it. Taking its title from the Dutch word ‘beeld’ – meaning both ‘statue’ and ‘image’ – the work reflects on how a religious object becomes differently knowable as it passes through cultural, institutional, and economic frames, and how its image accrues new meanings beyond any singular point of origin.
A post-screening conversation between Zhejun and the artist will explore the ideas and narratives behind the research and the making of the work.