Echo Zhang is an interdisciplinary sculptor & printmaking artist from China. Her works have strong feminist overtones, obsessed with breaking the rage of the colonized female body. She chanted with the lyric of a witch's spell, utilizes the sharpness and fragility of her materials as weapons, and transformed those unspeakable emotions into moments of perhaps poetry and sincerity.
Dance of Fire Eulogy
Collection Notes
My collection is a ceremony, part of an illusory cult: THE NEW GODDESS I created, a story about a woman shedding her flesh in flames and regrowing into both monster and goddess. Depending on the observer, feminism is simultaneously seen as a horrific monster or a divine goddess. Secularly, monsters are masculine, so I created a very different figure of a female monster, made from cheap performance dresses, corsets, bridal gowns, childbirth carriers, girls' hair flowers, and so on. I built a flaming fountain to act as the centerpiece of the ritual stage.
In many cultures, the ashes of the flames are not a symbol of death but of rebirth, just as the unpredictable raging lava burns everything, but the fertile land is reborn from the ashes. under the raging, beautiful, calm flames, the female body becomes a site of struggle, burning flesh as a weapon of resistance, reclaiming physical dominance is the process that allows me to grow and heal myself again.
The flame and the feminine are so similar. All begins with the cremation, where the colonized female body burns to ash and is reborn again.