Jingge Zhang (b. 1996 Beijing) is an image-based interdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2023. Her work is informed by her experiences both as an immigrant farm worker on an assembly line as well as a visual designer in an e-commerce industry where output is accelerated for mass distribution. Using her own labor as an entry point, Zhang examines the fabrication and circulation of images amid the current deluge of social media and content creation, ultimately questioning the machine of commodification and consumption.

Approaching her practice as a worker, Zhang combines the digital methods of deconstruction and collage with the manual application of my assemblages onto packing tape. Fusing replicated screen images with images of real life, her digital imagery encompasses a diverse range of sources found on screens or digital devices, ranging from digital archives and stock photos to screenshots, emojis, ephemeral snapshots of other screens, and fleeting daily captures by phone in everyday life. The tape transfer, a material of shipping and distribution, echoes not only the systems and visual language of mass production but also the invisible labor inextricably bound to these processes. By translating photographs and images into material objects, Zhang’s work represents the commodification of image production, which unfolds the economic significance within the processes along with the chaos, synthesis, and displacement that occurred across screens and everyday experiences.

In creating multiples, Zhang embodies a re-simulation of labor in the production line and effectively dismantles the notion of the original-separating art from its auratic nature into a product, while the base of tape-a flimsy medium of repair-reveals the degradation of an image over time and repetition.