Yi Zhang

Yi Zhang (1996, China) is an anti-disciplinary artist-researcher who works across drawing, video, installation, and workshops. Grounded in migration ecology and feminist ecology, their/her research draws on the modern history of invasive plants, the global war against rats, and the human hair trade. Their research traces how systems of categorization alienate, commodify, and discard the movements of human/non-human, material afterlives, and the border rejection toward those movements. Alongside their artistic practice, they are a fermenter and forager.

At MORPHO, Yi will continue their project on how categorization systems that define species as native, non-native, alien, and invasive, and how these systems echo the narratives against immigrants, tracing common rhetorics of boundary-making, threat, and purity across both domains. Invasive species rarely cause ecological collapse; they occupy niches opened by prior disruption, much as migrants are blamed for crises they didn't create. Drawing on lived experience foraging and navigating restrictive bureaucracy as an immigrant, they tenderly get to know their more-than-human neighbours, learning their migration stories and turning narratives of exclusion into gestures of healing justice and kin-making.

Yi graduated from AdMa at Sint Lucas Antwerpen in 2024, and In-Situ at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2021. Their projects were presented at Constant, Brussels; Varia, Rotterdam; Baltan Laboratories, Eindhoven; BioArt Laboratories, Eindhoven; The Grey Space in the Middle, The Hague; Clublokaal, Breda; T_Cyberhol, Antwerp; and M HKA, Antwerp.