Chinese-born and London-based artist 00 Zhang creates a world where digital and physical realities merge completely. Working with industrial materials like stainless steel and silver-coated resin, Zhang explores what she calls a “double-sided exile” – feelings of disconnection and connection in our digital age.

Her sculptural works Prototype 0033 and Prototype 0037 look like sea creatures or prawns with metallic shells. These forms represent duplications of the artist herself: they are not human bodies but avatar-like shells that interact with our game-like world. 00 Zhang uses industrial materials to tell the story of her generation’s struggle within rapid technological change. The cold metal surfaces contrast with human softness, showing how we adapt to an increasingly artificial environment.

The video game Honey takes players inside the complex world of bees and civilization. The game explores how bees, human society and economic systems are all connected, especially as the ecological crisis threatens biodiversity. For Zhang, the real world has become like a big game where people act like computer characters, following the same routines and visiting the same places. Through the bee’s perspective, Honey shows how we might lose our sense of what is real when everything becomes systematic and controlled.

Zhang believes we are all terminals in a network, like computer command lines communicating with a larger machine. Her work questions who controls whom: are we programming the digital world, or is it programming us? By creating art that exists both online and in galleries, Zhang invites us to think about how virtual experiences shape our daily lives and identities.

These artworks suggest that we need a new relationship with digital technology – one that recognises virtual and physical worlds as equally real parts of the human condition.

(Barnabás Bencsik)