Qinru Zhang: ELECTRIFYING the uncanny

By Madeleine Boyson

Homecore Poster, Courtesy of the Artist

Qinru Zhang’s art is electrified by the uncanny. It may be irrelevant whether this “unsettling atmosphere” is the medium, method, or both in her work, since the New York-based artist correctly identifies it as the “keyword” to her practice. [1] But Zhang also locates uncanniness where we ought to expect belonging: in our social constructions. Using time-based media to depict perceived, performed, and proscribed gender framed in and by the uncanny, Zhang creates a third space between reality and imagination where femininity is free to exist authentically.

Zhang—a multimedia artist and graphic designer—felt uneasy about patriarchal gender roles early on. “For me, femininity itself has been uncanny,” she says, and traces this ambiguity to virtues, sexualization, stereotypes, and beauty ideals. [2] In particular, Zhang repeatedly confronts generalizations about Asian femininity that render women as indistinguishable, objectifiable, or servile.

Uncanniness originally translates to unheimlich (the unhomely), literalizing the unfamiliarity of something new. [3] In Homecore (2022)—winner of Creative Quarterly Fine Art and NYX Gold awards—Zhang leans into unhomeliness through a twelve-year-old’s daily routine as it devolves into surrealism. Here the artist challenges the traditional home as “a safe and comfortable space” for girls in a narrative dream sequence. [4]

Viewers can watch Homecore’s 360-degree animation via flat-screen or virtual reality headset as chaos accelerates through a shell-shaped home. After discovering a hatching egg, the protagonist finds her toiletries scattered across floors and ceilings, an illustration turning its head, and television static that won’t respond to controller commands. Then, as she realizes that she’s looking in on herself, the girl reroutes perceptions of young femininity towards curiosity and self-determination. Homecore therefore sees the uncanny in domesticity not as dead-end, but “as an enchanting, no-exit space of self-reflection.” [5]

Still Image from Homecore (2022)

Zhang’s artistic foundations are also rooted in popular media. In the 2010s, she generated avatars on QQ (a Chinese social platform) and other websites, initially leaning into Internet anonymity to create androgynous icons. “In this safe digital space,” says Zhang, “I was free to express myself.” [6] But though breaking with gendered norms was practical, she noticed that technology is overrun with masculine aesthetics. This “genderizes the Internet,” Zhang explains, and suggests that “male aesthetics are official and professional while female aesthetics are only entertaining and superficial.” [7] Seeking to counteract that message, she embraced hyper-femininity.

From Homecore (2022)

Momomomomi (2022) is an augmented reality installation that builds on Zhang’s history with dress-up and magical girl anime, a fantasy subgenre of metamorphic, supernatural girls. Zhang originally designed Momomomomi with her own image to fulfill a fantasy of embodying the trope. Now, Momomomomi idolizes femininity’s “ornamental impracticality” as viewers digitally don the costume and face both themselves and the “imagined femininity in men’s heads.” [8] The installation also exhibits detached limbs, a blue wig with soulless eyes, and a pink cleaver wand—all of which memorialize “a cursed [or an accursed] cuteness,” which Zhang sees as another mechanism for female empowerment. [9]


In 1919, Sigmund Freud expanded the uncanny towards our current understanding: that which is terrifying, yet known. [10] Years later, roboticist Masahiro Mori graphed the association between humanlike figures and our affections for them, coining “the uncanny valley” to describe the dip in affinity when an entity becomes too humanoid. [11] But rather than criticize ambiguity’s terror or recoil from the valley, Zhang identifies uncanniness as a form of “sanity”—the means for understanding the true “intricacies of female identities.” [12]

Zhang at the Evans School, May 2023

Embodying the boldest and most subversive of these identities is The MILF (Man I’d Like to Feed) Collection, an ongoing multimedia project that comprises The MILF Film (2021) and related paraphernalia. Here Zhang speaks directly on the repressed or intimate desires of housewives and “the domestic…power dynamics in East Asian households,” particularly around female virtue. [13]

The MILF Film is a short 3D animation featuring a pink-haired housewife who cheerfully serves a feast to her husband only to grow violent when he does not consume every bite. She funnels her rage into force-feeding as her sadism disobeys the ideal homemaker in what Zhang describes as “an enchanting power that attracts and a ghostly force that destroys.” [14] “By empowering a heavily-sexualized identity—the MILF,” explains Zhang, “I want to bring out these women’s voices and desires against the patriarchy through an uncanny female image in all mediums.” 

From a twelve-year-old girl to a vengeful housewife, Zhang’s enigmatic characters allow her to create auxiliary space between digital and analog where the full spectrum of female identity can fight for sovereignty. And by working in time-based media—forcing the viewer to engage without control and to relinquish dominance to the “carrier of female frustrations, desires, and rages”—the artist sparks empathy for those controlled, trapped, or immersed themselves. Zhang’s digital uncanny therefore does not just make room for new or nonexistent worldviews, it establishes “cerebral connections that transcend beyond the limitation of space and time.” [15]

Homecore (2022) on the 16th and Arapahoe LED screen, May 2023

 
 

  1. From Qinru Zhang’s interview responses to the author, July 12, 2023.; RISD FAV Senior, “Qinru Zhang Artist Profile,” Vimeo, uploaded May 8, 2022, https://vimeo.com/707584034. 

  2. From Zhang’s interview.; “10 Questions with Qinru Zhang,” INTERVIEW | Qinru Zhang, Interviews Platform/Video Art/Installation/Issue 13, Al-Tiba 9 Contemporary Art, https://www.altiba9.com/artist-interviews/qinru-zhang-mixed-media-digital-fimininity.

  3. “The Uncanny,” Art Term, TATE, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/u/uncanny. German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch first used the term unheimlich (unhomely) in 1906.

  4. Unpublished interview with the artist.

  5. Homecore presentation description at Denver Digerati, May 6, 2023. https://denverdigerati.org/events/2023/5/6/qinru-zhang. 

  6. “10 Questions with Qinru Zhang.”

  7.  Unpublished interview with the artist.

  8. RISD FAV Senior, “Qinru Zhang Artist Profile.”; From Zhang’s interview.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” translated by Alix Strachey, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.

  11. Unpublished interview with the artist.

  12. RISD FAV Senior, “Qinru Zhang Artist Profile.”; From Zhang’s interview.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Unpublished interview with the artist.

  15. RISD FAV Senior, “Qinru Zhang Artist Profile.”; From Zhang’s interview.


Qinru Zhang (China, 1999) is a multimedia artist exploring identity, femininity, and uncanniness through digital and fine arts. Zhang transforms traditional femininity into an eerie existence through her gentle observation of feminine stories. Her work thinks about reality and imagination, digital existence, and the notion of mirroring. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with Honors in 2022. Currently, she lives and works in New York City.

Instagram: @qinruzhang

Madeleine Boyson (she/her) is a Denver-based writer, poet, and artist. She holds a BA in Art History and History from the University of Denver and makes her living as a communications and editorial coordinator, creative director, and arts writer.