Zhou Liang

About Liang

Liang is a Chinese-born artist and practice-based PhD researcher currently based in the United Kingdom. Her work investigates the visual and material transformation of poetic and narrative texts within the context of contemporary printmaking. Drawing from both Chinese and Western literary and visual traditions, Liang explores how fragmented language—particularly the interplay between Chinese and English—can be restructured into visual compositions that transcend cultural boundaries.Her practice engages with themes of language and identity, reflecting her personal navigation between cultural spaces. Incorporating Chinese poetic imagery and sensibilities into her print-based works, Liang's research constructs layered visual narratives that interrogate the boundaries between word and image, self and other, and language and material. Through her art, she reflects on her evolving identity as a translingual and transcultural subject, questioning how cultural belonging can be reimagined through visual means and explore the issue of identity.
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Project Statement：
This project explores the visual and material transformation of poetic and narrative texts through contemporary printmaking. Blending fragmented Chinese and English text with the sensibility of Chinese poetic imagery, the works investigate how language crosses cultural boundaries and evolves into visual experience. Through layering, carving, and reimagining texts, the project invites viewers into a cross-cultural dialogue between word, image, and material form.




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In the Flesh of Language, 2025, Printmaking, Dimensions variable

This series of work presents a poetic exploration of bodily textual symbols. Drawing inspiration from the earliest form of Chinese pictographic writing — oracle bone script — the works visualize female bodily symbols and investigate the boundaries of language within a cross-cultural context. While evoking the gestural qualities of traditional Chinese calligraphy, the series is fundamentally concerned with the visualisation of text itself, aiming to create a form of visual poetry rooted in Chinese imagery.


Echoes of the Mountain, 2025, woodcut

This series brings together the structural logic of visual poetry and the abstract sensibility of mountain imagery, through a combination of letterforms embedded in wood and carved wooden panels. Centered on the word “ECHO,” the work deconstructs language into tactile fragments, transforming alphabetic forms into visual rhythms within the wooden medium.The “mountain” here is not depicted as a representational landscape, but rather evoked through the spatial aesthetics of Chinese shanshui painting. Carving, absence, and material layering are used to build a contemplative visual space where form suggests both echo and elevation.Text becomes image; the mountain becomes a resonant surface. The natural grain of wood, the deliberate incisions, and the presence of fragmented language together form a poetic field suspended between sound and silence, text and terrain.This work invites the viewer to engage with language not as a system of signs, but as a spatial, material resonance that quietly mirrors the structure of the mountain itself.

Light, Wind, and the Silent Trees, 2025, wood mixedDimensions variable

This series investigates the convergence of text and image through the medium of fragmented visual composition. By interweaving visual poetry with collaged photographic fragments, the works create a layered interplay between meaning, materiality, and form. English and Chinese texts are juxtaposed within the pictorial space, reflecting an ongoing dialogue between languages, cultures, and modes of seeing. Through this process, the boundaries between reading and viewing are blurred, inviting the audience to navigate a fluid terrain where language becomes image, and image gestures towards language.