Zhang Meng: I Lost Half My Soul Here

中文

Zhang Meng: I Lost Half My Soul Here
Solo Exhibition ShanghART M50, Shanghai

Date: 09.05, 2026 - 10.31, 2026

Artists: ZHANG Meng 张萌

Curator: Fiona He
Artist Talk: Fiona He & Zhang Meng ｜15:00 - 16:00, 5th Sept
Opening: 16:00, 5th Sept
Duration: September 5–October 31, 2026
Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00–18:00
Location: ShanghART M50, Building 16, 50 Moganshan Road, Putuo District, Shanghai

I thought
I had lost half of my soul here

But when I came
I found nothing

Now I think
I have lost half of my soul there

Perhaps when I return
I will find nothing there either

Between here and there
lies a long river
flowing slowly
across the plain of death

2016.10.23
Aachen

I Lost Half My Soul Here brings together highlights from various phases of Zhang Meng’s artistic practice over the past decade, with a particular focus on her recent expansion from drawings, artist books, sound, to textiles and other media. The exhibition title is drawn from a poem written by the artist ten years ago, reflecting on her experience of moving between different cities, languages, and cultural environments. Changes of place and shifts in familial and personal relationships shape the underlying structure of her lived experience; dreams and visceral feelings continue to unsettle established notions of time and space, allowing past events to assume new forms and iterations across different media.
Memory has long been a critical point of entry into Zhang Meng’s practice. Childhood experiences, chance encounters while living away from home, or sensations associated with a particular moment may re-emerge as the starting point for a work of art. Over time, different places, people, and experiences form new connections in her images, while specific details from these lived experiences reorganize themselves into more fluid spaces and narratives. Zhang repeatedly returns to certain experiences while accepting the ways in which life itself transforms memory. Her works thus contain an ever-shifting distance between the individual and the past, with each return opening onto freer relationships between space, scale, and narrative.

Zhang Meng’s 2025 residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands, marked an important turning point in her recent practice. There, she began working with hand weaving, machine weaving, and batik. Lines that had filled her drawings began to move beyond the surface of paper and into the physical structures of wool, cotton, linen, and other fabrics. Weaving extended the duration of making, while the thickness, colour, texture, and density of the threads became active elements in the formation of each work. Machine weaving introduced further processes of design translation, technical support, and specialised knowledge from others, allowing images to undergo transformations between different technologies and materials. At the same time, the life and surroundings of the residency entered her works on paper, giving the immediacy of the present an increasingly distinct place in her practice.

The development of Zhang Meng’s recent work can be traced through her earlier practice. Sleeping Dress stitches her diary entries into an intimate garment; Address Book and Das Absage Buch turn letters, text, and sound into material traces of personal history; while A Salvation of the Fat from My Kindergarten Lunch Box, rooted in childhood experience, has undergone multiple transformations over the years through drawing, textiles, artist’s books, and other media. Her recent hand-woven and machine-woven works continue to explore how experience takes on material form. Lines from her drawings become the warp and weft, interwoven and suspended, while personal memories enter a creative process shaped collectively through material, technique, and collaboration. Touch, text, sound, and space give Zhang’s personal experience an increasingly complex material structure.

This exhibition presents an important phase of Zhang Meng’s practice that continues to unfold. Over the past decade, her exploration of place, the self, and the experience of living between different cultural environments has gradually extended into generative relationships with people, memories, materials, and others. The “here” and “there” in the poem written ten years ago continue to run through this body of work, although the positions they mark continue to shift with the course of the artist’s life. Zhang’s practice reshuffles various temporalities and experiences, which in turn, shaping her sense of self and the world around her.