Valerie Zhang
Valerie Zhang did not grow up in an environment that formally trained or directed her toward art, but her family placed strong value on observation, expression, and attentiveness to the world. Rather than encouraging a specific career path, they allowed her the freedom to explore what genuinely interested her. Early on, comics played a significant role in shaping her relationship to art and narrative, introducing her to storytelling through images and sequential form.
Her engagement with art and writing developed gradually through different stages of life. In primary school, she began writing stories and drawing comics, often reimagining existing characters and inventing alternative storylines. During high school, her interests expanded as she read more novels and began imagining herself inside fictional worlds, using narrative as a way to explore identity and possibility. At the same time, she became deeply interested in open-world adventure games and text-based role-playing games, which allowed her to think about choice, consequence, and agency in interactive ways. These experiences led her to combine real-world social observations with experimental forms of expression.
Zhang’s formal education helped consolidate these interests. A year at the School of Visual Arts provided a foundation in artistic skills, while her later studies at the University of Rochester, particularly in digital media and art history, exposed her to a wide range of artistic languages and critical frameworks. She credits her education not only with providing theoretical and historical context, but with teaching her how to integrate that knowledge with lived experience, emotion, and social observation.
Her practice moves fluidly across writing, visual art, digital media, and narrative-based forms. This tendency toward experimentation emerged partly from a lack of early institutional support for art, which meant she was never guided into a single medium or protected artistic identity. As a result, working across genres became a practical way to continue creating without permission. She approaches medium choice as a question of honesty, selecting forms based on what best translates an experience rather than on stylistic consistency or categorization.
Zhang’s creative process is closely tied to everyday moments and internal states. She often records her dreams, which tend to be vivid and narrative-driven, and these images frequently become the starting point for new work. Inspiration also comes from engaging with books, television, and games, particularly when she becomes aware of how narrative structure or visual language shapes perception. Digital drawing plays an important role in capturing ideas quickly, especially when time and focus are limited by academic responsibilities.
One of her most demanding projects, Self Sutures, was created under significant physical and emotional pressure while she balanced academic stress and personal change. The work required her to learn unfamiliar technical processes quickly and to rely on support from peers and mentors. Through this experience, she came to understand that creative work does not always emerge from ideal conditions, and that exhaustion and urgency can become part of a project’s meaning.
Across her work, Zhang returns to themes of rupture and continuity, vulnerability and repair. She is interested in how wounds, both emotional and physical, can coexist with growth rather than being erased. Rather than offering resolution, her work creates space for reflection, allowing contradiction to remain visible. Looking ahead, she hopes to continue expanding her interdisciplinary practice, including developing an augmented reality picture book that combines narrative, visual language, and interactive technology, while remaining guided by curiosity, uncertainty, and sustained attention.
