EAGER ZHANG & RODRIGO CARAZAS PORTAL

Jun 3

JUNE 3 - 24, 2022

Artist

Eager Zhang (b. 1997, China Mainland) is a visual artist and graphic designer. Being brought up as multi-lingual and trained with coding tools in college, she explores among the territory of nature studies, language issues and poetry writing, and expands her practice into printmaking, editorial design, and web architecture.

Zhang’s recent works were featured & awarded by Tokyo Type Directors Club (3 times), ItsNiceThat, Asian Pacific Design No.17, Society of Typographic Art (STA 100), The Design Kids 20’, etc. She graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago as an MFA, and received a Bachelor of Engineering from Tongji University, Shanghai. Zhang is a full-time faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute as an AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow, teaching in Graphic Design program.

Curator

Rodrigo Carazas Portal is an artist, curator and educator raised in the Callao Province of Peru. He holds an MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2020) and a Sculpture BFA from George Mason University (2015). Rodrigo is a member of New Museum’s incubator (NEW INC), full-time faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute and a 2020-2022 AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow.

Also, he is co-founder of the curatorial design practice Paradigm and R.I.C.O. R.O.B.O. — a cultural platform interrogating the western zeitgeist tural while disclosing untold stories related to the latinx reality and its current diaspora.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Applying their personal experiences, cultural heritage and artistic sensibilities, Eager Zhang’s exhibition “Willow” draws a constellation tracing their identity through design, botany and history. The crosscultural connotations of the willow tree serve as a metaphor that supports a body of work countering heteronormativity –simultaneously rendering Zhang’s current enterprise as a Chinesse queer woman living in the USA.
For their inaugural solo exhibition in the Midwest, Zhang presents aleatory programmed diagrams via 3D printing, video and ephemerally connected paper that depict their ongoing research regarding gender, legacy and technology.

-Rodrigo Carazas Portal, curator