What remains? What persists? Linda Zhang asks what continues to exist and act over time, and how forces we barely notice continue to shape the world. These questions have gradually become central to her artistic practice.

Through painting, moving image, and installation, Zhang seeks to make these processes of persistence perceptible. Persistence may manifest through physical or psychological space, language, culture, nature, or systems. The past continues to act on the future; the future continues to reshape how we read the past.

"An echo of the past in the future, a reflex from the future on the past." — Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs (1869)

These questions are not abstract for Zhang. She grew up in China during the social transformations of the 1980s — a period whose cultural and educational imprint has stayed with her as a distant but indelible memory. Higher education and a career in finance in Europe later gave her a working understanding of systems, structures, and the mechanisms beneath them. Art became a way to re-examine these systems from within. What once seemed a separate chapter of her life has become an important influence on her practice. These layered memories — of an early life in the East meeting a later life in the West — surface in her early paintings and, more recently, in the Temporal Surface series.

Within Zhang’s practice, time is a necessary condition. Materials are chosen not for their original function but for their capacity to reveal persistence as it unfolds through time. As a result, the work is not bound to any single medium: it may take the form of painting, installation, moving image, or other forms, depending on the work itself.

Her early paintings work through temporality directly, using oil, acrylic, ink, watercolour, pastel, crayon, and charcoal to trace how memory layers and resurfaces — a Persistence of Consciousness, built from the inside outward into psychological spaces that resist being fully put into words.

More recent works in the Temporal Surface series extend this research into installation and moving image. Zhang’s current work moves from inner memory and consciousness toward broader questions of life, language, institutions, power, and the material world.