Hai Zhang

Hai Zhang received a Master of Architecture from Florida International University (Miami), and a Bachelor of Architecture from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China. With a background in photography, architecture and journalism, Zhang treats each medium as an integral investigative process, examining subject matter, context, and the conditions of representation. He has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries across New York, Europe, Russia, and Asia, and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2014.

Zhang has received grants and fellowships from the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Rafael Viñoly Architecture Research Fellowship, and the India China Institute at The New School. His work is held in the permanent collection of the U.S. Library of Congress, Asia Art Archive in America, the Queens Museum Library, and the Center for Book Arts. He teaches at Parsons School of Design.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your practice and process.

Hai Zhang

I was trained and practiced architecture for more than a decade. In architecture, photography is an assisting tool for observation and conceptualizing the ideas. Photography helps us to see things. I was fascinated by the investigative nature of the medium.

In 2008, I left the architectural office to take photos full time. I started in photojournalism and loved exploring place and talking to the real people. The physical connection shaped my imagination. Creating work is a process of investigation and chain reactions - it questions the existing and embarks on the new.

My projects usually start from spontaneous photographs or a story that I read or heard. Over time, the work evolves to include drawings, prints and other forms. My process is slow and often stretches over many years. My Alabama project lasted fifteen years. My work in China spanned over a decade, with multiple chapters. I'm currently in the sixth year working on a Catskills Mountains project.

Tell us more about the Catskill project.

The work started from taking photographs intuitively and collecting experiences. I have always been interested in where a photograph can lead us. When I photographed trees and forests, I began wondering about the time before and after the moment the image was taken.

Before I felt the impulse to manipulate these photographs, my friend, my son, and I created several sculpture projects in the woods. These constructions were highly time- and site-specific. Witnessing how those pieces responded to the natural environment inspired me to intervene in my photographs.

Trees are resilient – they resist external forces, yet they are flexible enough to adapt to new environments. I experimented with malleable materials such as sheet metal, plastic, and paper. Paper, in particular, felt conceptually connected to trees. I became interested in how abstract ideas—resilience, resistance, adaptation—could be transformed into something tangible.

Your work has had an anthropological approach, where you travel and embed in communities to understand them. Tell us about sourcing text from the Catskill community?

I love asking questions and our neighbors love telling us the history of the places, the forests and trees. One neighbor is a Deputy Sheriff and a logger, whose family settled in this region in the 1700s. Another is an artist who moved to the Catskills from New York City in the 1990s. They told me stories of their family ties to the region and it made me interested in the stories of the forest.

I received a fellowship from the Delaware Valley Art Alliance in 2025 which helped me to extend my outreach. During the last summer, I created several “Thoughts-Collecting Boxes” and placed them in local libraries and other places the community gathers. I integrated texts from my interviews and thought boxes into my work. I also did archival historical research to learn about the evolution of the region. Through all of this I can see a very different Catskills.

How did the history of land management and logging in the Catskills inform this work?

The diverse, yet often controversial, history of the Catskill Mountains is the underlying drive of my interests in the environment of the region. Forestry has long been essential to the Catskills and threading through the lives in the region. The rise and fall of communities, the booms and busts of industries, the emerging and diminishing of agricultural practices, are deeply intertwined with the life of trees across these rolling mountains.

While the American Revolution created an independent nation, it cut the last straw of the native Lenape people to remain in their homeland, which they had inhabited for more than 1,200 years. Most were forced to move west. Their trace was reduced to only the names of places and backroads.

Today it is hard to imagine that the forest was nearly exhausted by relentless logging over two centuries, culminating in the 1930s. With the discovery of the acidic components in the bark of Hemlock trees in the late 19th century, the region became the tanning capital in the US. Hemlocks were logged for their bark and the tanning process was polluted the area.

Knowing this history, I can look at the woods differently, looking at my photos of tree differently and imagine the scenes differently.

Are there artists who you think your work is in conversation with?

Roni Horn, Anselm Keifer, Zoe Leonard, Halldór Laxness

What themes/ideas do you find yourself continuing to return to over time?

My desire to re-visit memory. My projects usually last for years. Through photographs, I collect a lot of fragmental moments. There are many gaps in between, which is important and interesting, meaning I can always come back to fill the voids, to reconstruct the narrative.

How do you approach the natural world in this moment of climate disruption? Does the climate crisis factor into your work?

For a long time, we have been disconnected from the reality of the natural world. We tend to see nature as a parallel world or merely as a source of materials. We do not truly see ourselves as one with it. Technological progress has shielded much of the population—especially in developed countries—from directly experiencing the crisis. On the other hand, those same advancements have intensified our separation from nature. I try to investigate the role I can play—what I truly need from the natural world, and what nature might need from us.

What are your thoughts on the role of art and artists today, at this particular moment in time?

For me, the most compelling aspect of art is imagination. Imagination is essential in helping us integrate with what surrounds us, including nature. Art does not bear the responsibility to solve problems. It bears the responsibility to raise questions.