Miranda Fengyuan Zhang (b. China; lives and works in New York) approaches weaving as a conceptual system through which to think about order and disorder, restraint and surrender. For Zhang, weaving is both method and metaphor: a process that binds together structure and fragility, precision and chance. The loom becomes a site where rules are tested and control gives way to the possibility of collapse.
Zhang began her practice through an exploration of material possibilities, moving from hand-knitted forms to weaving as a way to reconstruct images through thread. Her early weavings, often set against monotone grounds, drew from personal travels and the visual language of modern architecture and landscape, examining how memory and perception could be translated into woven form.
She later introduced structured patterns—stripes, checks, and grids—as fixed frameworks within which images unfold. Drawing from domestic textile motifs, these patterns reference everyday materials historically coded as feminine or decorative. Through them, Zhang explores systems of visual order while questioning the material and the tool themselves as social constructs—how acts of weaving, patterning, and repetition embody both discipline and cultural conditioning.
This inquiry evolved into what Zhang calls chance pieces, where procedural rules generate layered transformations. In Bubble (Chance), for instance, a woven field of pink and yellow stripes was digitally overlaid with a drawing of a bubble, re-woven, photographed, dissected into paper strips, rearranged by chance, and finally rewoven as collage. Each stage reconfigures the image and its logic, allowing structure and accident to coexist. The process itself—of translation, fragmentation, and reconstruction—becomes the work’s central subject, tracing how images move through different systems of control and change.
Zhang’s sculptural works extend these investigations into spatial form. Cast or assembled from textile, clay, and found materials, they echo the logic of weaving through repetition and layering, translating soft systems into solid structures. In both two and three dimensions, she treats form as a site where structure meets collapse.
Writing in Artforum, Jenny Wu described her work as “a meditation on structure undone from within,” revealing a practice that finds freedom through the slow unraveling of systems. Zhang’s ongoing research extends weaving’s logic beyond the loom—toward a broader inquiry into how material, discipline, and chance can coexist within acts of making, perception, and surrender.
Zhang has had solo shows at Capsule (Shanghai); CLEARING (New York / Los Angeles); Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo; Brussels); Halsey McKay Gallery (New York); and Candice Mandy Gallery (New York). Other exhibitions include: MASSIMODECARLO (London); Clearing (New York; Los Angeles) and Chambers Fine Art Gallery (New York). She has been the recipient of the La Maison de l'Art Contemporain residency in Asilah, Morocco and the Arquetopia Foundation in Oaxaca, Mexico.
