DIANA MULAN ZHU

Diana Mulan Zhu is a second-generation Chinese-American artist, visual activist, filmmaker, technologist, and scholar seeking to understand shame, the body, sexuality, and the digital gaze through painting, video art, performance, and installation.

Diana grew up in the Pacific Northwest and studied computer science and studio art at Vanderbilt University for her BA. She has an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, where she wrote her thesis on how cyber sexual assault and cable television can mediate each other as virtual violence. Diana also has her MFA in Art from Stony Brook University and was a Graduate Fellow at DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism). Diana has over a decade of professional experience as a technologist at tech and media powerhouses such as Microsoft, Intel, NBCUniversal, and Viacom.

 Diana is a PhD student and Cota Robles Fellow at the University of California Cruz in Film and Digital Media. She was recently the Emily Mason-Wolf Kahn Fellow as an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center. Diana has screened and exhibited her work internationally, including at Anthology Film Archives (New York), Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery(New York), and Prisma Estudio (Lisbon).

My creative practice revolves around tracing the circuits of inherited trauma, cultural alienation, and the hypersexualized representation of Asian women. As an American-born Chinese woman, I confront my sense of “otherness,” constantly shaped by Western bias and techno-orientalist stereotypes. While I am aware of the privileges I hold in Western society, my body remains marked by an unassimilable identity that refuses to fit comfortably within the narrative of the American dream.

Technology plays a crucial role in this exploration. In ‘Hand Me Down: Xiaohui,’ I use generative AI as a tool and a critique of the systems that perpetuate these biases. The media I create is a pastiche of appropriated imagery, reflecting the schizophrenic nature of my experience as a hypersexualized, racialized body within the digital sphere.

Language is another site of rebellion in my work. Although Mandarin was my first language, I lost fluency as I grew up in a hyper-assimilated American setting. I intentionally do not consult official sources for translation; instead, I rely on my fragmented childhood vocabulary. In doing so, I disrupt traditional English subtitles and challenge monolingual Western audiences to feel, if only briefly, the frustration of being outsiders.

My practice speaks to the long genealogies in art history and geo-political history of sexualization and physical violence against Asian women, specifically the history of migrant Asian women in sex industries both in America and abroad, as well as the well-documented objectifying orientalism in Western art and “techno-orientalism” in Hollywood filmmaking.

I also draw on motifs of the diary, pornography, and smartphone photography to riff on the way the surveilled mass image has forced us into a paradox of both exploiting and empowering ourselves. I ask, what does it take to be seen and to be known in a “post-internet” age? I use my own personal testimony of family and personal narratives to meditate on how technology informs how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

I like the way “old” media such as oil painting, sculpture, and textiles can also speak to “new” media such as the internet, smartphone photography, and software. I am always seeking to deconstruct the myth of the digital as being immaterial or the sense that digital/analog is binary by implicating an embodied, haptic sense of virtuality. For example, I often use the canvas to access the screen and capture a photographic way of seeing my oil paintings.

As a Marxist feminist, I look through a temporal flattening of the material body and immaterial memory through the simultaneously painted and digitized image. By transforming between new and old media, I hope to unearth the historical conditions of representation.

EDUCATION

2024-2030 University of California Santa Cruz | PhD in Film and Digital Media

2021-2024 Stony Brook University | Master of Fine Arts

2019-2021 New York University | Master of Arts (Media, Culture and Communications)

2018 Portland State University | Post-Baccalaureate (Film & Art History)

2011-2016 Vanderbilt University | Bachelor of Arts (Studio Art & Minor in Computer Science)

EXHIBITIONS

2024 Hand Me Down: Xiaohui, DOC NYC Film Festival | New York, NY

2024 Hand Me Down: Xiaohui, Chroma Art Film Festival | Miami, FL

2024 Real Reels Film Collective, All Night Skate | Brooklyn, NY

2024 Sex Ed Salon, Hex House | Brooklyn, NY

2024 Poor Housekeeping, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery | Stony Brook, NY

2024 SOLO EXHIBITION - Homesick, Prisma Estudio | Lisbon, Portugal

2023 SOLO EXHIBITION - What Came Before, Lawrence Alloway Gallery | Stony Brook, NY

2023 SOLO EXHIBITION - Afterimage, Lawrence Alloway Gallery | Stony Brook, NY

2023 Cross Contamination, Anthology Film Archives | New York, NY

2023 Marina, Sunwood Student Exhibit | Stony Brook, NY

2022 Bodies Object, Sagtikos Gallery | Selden, NY

2022 All Over Again, Lawrence Alloway Gallery | Stony Brook, NY

2016 Homecoming, Space 204 | Nashville, TN

2016 College Art Student Exhibit, Community Arts Program at Cummins Station | Nashville, TN

2015 Artists After Dark, Vanderbilt University Student Gallery | Nashville. TN

AWARDS AND HONORS

2024 Amy J. Elias Travel Award - Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

2024 Emily Mason - Wolf Kahn Fellowship - Vermont Studio Center 

2024 Hex House Artist Residency - The School for Poetic Computation

2024 Graduate Council Fellowship - Stony Brook University

2024 Cota Robles Fellowship - University of California Santa Cruz

2023 Prisma Estudio Artist in Residence - Lisbon, Portugal

2024 Sunwood Art Award - Stony Brook University

2021 Graduate Fellow, DISCO (Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, Optimism) Network

2014 Best Overall Design - Society of News Design