Collaboration

Anime American

Animated gif of muscular blue frog-based pokemon smashing a smaller less muscular frog-based pokemon into the water

Lio Min and Diane Zhou collect anime ephemera. (That's all.)

Mural at Bushwick Starr

Mural of my Chinese name intertwined with Tala Worrell's name written in Arabic in orange and green, with many doodles and creatures densely packed between the words.

Mural made up of large Chinese and Arabic words and many doodles packed between the strokes, across from a wall painted in red, magenta, and purple.

Mural made up of large Chinese and Arabic words and many doodles packed between the strokes, across from a wall painted in red, magenta, and purple. The Bushwick Starr, the name of the theater, is painted on the back wall.

Detail of mural with apple, fish, and tooth with sunglasses in thick pink lines, and various designs in thin maroon strokes.

Detail of mural featuring flamingoes, whale bus, totoro, etc.

Detail of mural featuring smiling cat and abstract patterns.

Detail of mural featuring radiating flower, buttered toast, sonic the hedgehog's face, and abstract patterns.

Little Palm Tree, Young Reed (2019)

Little Palm Tree, Young Reed is a collaborative mural by Tala Worrell (تالا وريل) and Diane Zhou (周葭葭) that was on view at The Bushwick Starr from October-November 2019. Worrell and Zhou share an interest in how moving between varied situations, values, languages, and attitudes give rise to unique structures of feeling where the boundaries of the self fluctuates between definition and dissolution. In this collaboration Worrell and Zhou fuse their names in Arabic and Chinese as a hybrid framework to create intersections where surprising connections are drawn between different spiritual, commercial, and personal iconographies.

Understanding a name as the initial abstraction of the self, Worrell and Zhou use Arabic and Chinese for each language’s unique position when placed in the context of the United States - where the scripts are less commonly understood for their meanings and more often appreciated as visual symbols. Interwoven within the letters, the artists use free-form stream of consciousness drawing to create a veil of imagery that recalls vision tests where certain details are revealed when one eye is covered or uncovered. By straddling the familiar and strange Worrell and Zhou create an intricate maze of associations that can only be seen in parts and is impossible to see from one vantage point.

Sponge Gourd Collective

Installation photo of When Will Today be Reopened? (2018). It depicts a door and windows inside a Beijing hutong. Through the windows, a monitor is visible, showing two hands touching, over a photo of Baitasi. On the windows themselves, there are family photos applied as stickers.

When Will Today Be Reopened? (2018)

丝瓜集团 (Sponge Gourd Collective) investigates urban transformation to explore Chinese futurities. We develop multimedia projects that broaden popular conceptions of China, to leave more room for the blurry spaces in between.

EST

Installation photo of Outside the Palace of Heavenly Purity (2018). On the left is a large photo of Zheng Bo’s piece A Chinese Communist Garden in Paris (Proposal I), and on the right is Jen Liu’s Pink Slime Caesar Shift on a large monitor.

Outside the Palace of Heavenly Purity (2018)
Works shown: Zheng Bo, Jen Liu

EST (Eastern Standard Time) is a research collective co-founded by Celine Wong Katzman, Son Kit, and Diane Zhou. EST questions the Western imaginary of Asia as a monolithic entity. While overly-expansive, orientalist definitions make it impossible to ascribe cultural, political, or geographical unity to Asia, EST is interested in its potential as a call to organize across a spectrum of experience. EST is based in New York, NY and Providence, RI. Recently, EST curated Outside the Palace of Heavenly Purity at Bitforms Gallery and Five Contortions at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University, Providence RI.

Zodiac Cafe

Zodiac Cafe is an online collaboration with writer Lio Min centering around the 12 signs of the Eastern Zodiac. We use the traits associated with each animal as a starting point for each piece.

Comic Practice

A short comic. The left panel is a person standing on the subway looking downward, and on the right is what she’s looking at: A person who seems to be staring back at her, but with another person’s hand in the way, obscuring most of her face.

Comic Practice was an ongoing project with writer Lio Min where we would give each other prompts of either comic/image or writing, and respond to each other. We don’t update it anymore but you can still look at it.