Painting canvas is an entry to an inner space of an artist, just as a digital screen is to a virtual space. Over the past decade, Sitian Zeng’s paintings have explored the concepts of space, interface, and subjectivity in various formats, testing the boundaries between virtual, digital, and physical spaces. By considering the painting canvas as a metaphorical digital screen, she invites the audience to an imaginary world, evoking our reflection on our everyday digital experience and the ubiquitous screens and interfaces in contemporary life.
Today, when screens rub against each other without resistance and images appear immediately, Sitian Zeng sticks to the slow, vague, tactile quality of painting. Her newly emerging practice presents the canvas as a kind of “digital screen,” inviting us to enter imaginary spaces that resonate with people’s digital experience today and the interfaces they are always mediated through. Zeng doesn’t reject the digital world but tries to ask what digital subjectivity means in a state where subjectivity is stretched—split, even—across the digital and the physical world.
In her earlier works, digital tools are used to explore the psychology of doubled subjectivity. Blue in the Dream (2020) shows a woman wrapped in printed fabrics. Her mirrored reflection hangs in the air in a dreamlike state, suspended in the distance from her. The horizon disappears, and all familiar objects become alien—meaning this is not quite a state of sleep but not fully awake either. The doubled figure adds a Lacanian “mirror stage” tension: the real self and the ideal self exist but never coincide, creating a gap where the subject is split. This work triggers a strong resonance with the digital subjectivity of today: people can always find mediated versions of themselves through the screen.
Her Symbiosis · Coexistence series (2022) was created during the pandemic. The focus shifts from the space of habitation to the spaces we live in—home becomes a refuge or a place that is increasingly confined, while trees experience the opposite condition: infinite access to earth and sky but in a threatened state, surrounded by the advance of humans. Zeng uses a strategy of “identity transposition” to question the existence of space — what feels safe may be restrictive, and what appears free may be limited. These works show a perspective that is slightly further away: from digital identity toward ecological and existential interdependence.
As her research progressed, Zeng parted ways with the digitally designed framework. Entanglement is a monumental watercolor, spanning over six meters. She abandons composition along a line but follows a “rhizomatic” structure — what grows spontaneously is image, one form giving rise to another. A bird, a metaphor for human subjectivity, appears caught within a fabricated digital world, entangled in invisible data flows. Here, water’s translucency creates a sense of fragility — the translucency and instability of the boundaries between humans and the digital world they consume — and also consumes us.
In her most recent exhibition, Interface: A Discrete Body (2025), she introduces works that extend painting into the physical contact between the viewer and the artwork. Kaleidoscope is a series of rotatable watercolor devices that asks the viewer to move the artwork by hand. The body in the painting is fractured into different segments, all ambiguous in their states of dissemination — constantly disseminated, reinterpreted, and misread by the receiver — further cementing the fact that these are not images meant to be passively received but pieces that ask the receiver to take action — to move the artwork by hand. Contrary to any assumption, these works have not been produced with any AI tools but create the illusion of machine-generated images. The receiver’s gesture — the hand reaching “into” the interface — interacts directly with the virtual world through the painted surface.
Diaries is focused on layering and materiality. Taking images from the artist’s sketchbooks, they seem to burst outwards, accompanied by fabric that appears to be human organs. Diaries normally contain unconscious thoughts and day-to-day experience; here they become sculptural – the inner world of the unseen made visible, perhaps even memory itself spilling out into space. Painting positions painting as a threshold – a site where the psychological and the physical meet.
Throughout all stages of her practice, Sitian Zeng persistently pushes at what painting can be after digital culture. She doesn’t depict screens – she thinks with them. Painting is a temporal site: a place where linear, real-world time, the time of subjectivity that is neither linear nor real, and the weight of years of painterly labour, intersect. It’s a potent choice of medium: the chance, delay and vulnerability of watercolour. In its softness is resistance; to the compressed speed of mass media. In its material seepage is a reminder that images have bodies too.
As a doctoral researcher her artistic production is situated within, and in response to, wider research investigations into post-digital identity, power relations and expanded painting. Her research-driven practice eschews didacticism, and philosophical ideas have a correspondent in poetic, visual invention. Each of her works places the viewer not as a passive recipient, but as an embodied subject absorbing and digesting information as they move and perceive. Her work is for anyone who has ever had a screen time, who has ever scrolled. It is for anyone who has ever been human: it captures the friction of existing in two worlds at once: here, grounded; there, perpetually extended. Her paintings do not promise redemption. Instead they ask a question – how do we stay whole, when the screens we inhabit, continually reconfigure us?
In Sitian Zeng’s work, that question comes alive – fluid, fragile, human. In her opinion, our bodies, memories, sensations have already become ‘events on an interface’, and painting provides a means to reconnect the self with the world. She is not escaping, not simply critiquing technology. She exposes a new condition of humanity after digital mediation – we now inhabit two worlds, and her art teaches us how to be in both. At its most fundamental level her practice poses one question: as screens continually reconfigure who we are, how do we remain whole?
MORE: sitianzeng.com / @sitian.zeng
