Yawen Zhang

My current works emerge from my own surgical experiences, combining painting and sculptural methods to depict fragments of flesh and symbolic elements drawn from medical procedures. The materials I use mimic the textures and behaviours of living tissue. These works are not illustrations of trauma. They are its residue, its refusal to be forgotten.

A body that has been operated on is a body that has been entered, reorganised, and returned to itself changed. It carries new geometries: scars that rewrite the surface, stitches that impose order onto rupture. My practice takes these seriously as material facts rather than metaphors. I work with substances that behave like skin, that hold shape the way flesh holds memory: reluctantly, imperfectly, with visible effort.

What interests me is not suffering as subject matter, but suffering as a form of knowledge that medicine tends to translate away. Clinical language moves quickly from wound to diagnosis, from pain to treatment plan. Something gets lost in that process. The felt experience, the unresolved parts, the things that don’t convert into data. My work tries to hold onto that remainder.

I seek to move beyond the personal and open dialogues between patients, artists, and viewers. I want to create spaces, both physical and emotional, where the rawness of lived pain is not hidden or softened, but shared, shaped, and seen on its own terms.

By depicting the brutal beauty of healing, I invite the audience into a slower and more uncomfortable form of looking. What does a body look like when it remembers? What does it mean to be seen as a wound rather than a person? These are not rhetorical questions. They describe the conditions under which many people move through medical systems every day, known only by what is wrong with them.

The work asks what it would mean to look again, differently.