Born with Tetralogy of Fallot, I have relied on medical care to stay alive. The treatments that sustain me have also altered my body and my sense of ownership over it, leaving traces that extend beyond visible scars.
Through photography, medical objects, and biological models, I explore how care and constraint coexist within medicine. My work gives form to the uncertainty of living in a body that feels intimately mine, yet remains dependent on interventions beyond my control.
Voyage focuses on migration and homesickness, exploring what "home" means both physically and culturally. By telling an immigrant's personal story through images, I want to show how people navigate between memory and belonging. Ultimately, the project reveals how our idea of "home" keeps changing over time.
After starting my college life in the United States, public transportation became part of how I learned to navigate an unfamiliar place. Boarding grew from these journeys, tracing the spaces and passing encounters that surround movement.
Through black-and-white photographs, I follow the gestures of passengers and the structures that frame their journeys. Light falls across stairways and waiting areas, drawing attention to places easily overlooked on the way elsewhere. I am interested in how private moments unfold within shared spaces, where people briefly travel together while carrying different expectations and destinations.
Moving between observation and personal experience, the series reflects my growing familiarity with a new environment.
Traveling across three U.S. states and visiting five organizations, I photographed animals whose lives unfold alongside our own. I became attentive to their relationships, gestures, and ways of inhabiting environments shaped by human presence.
WE, ME explores the tension between individual lives and a shared world. Through photography, I consider how we encounter animals, what we recognize in them, and what remains beyond our understanding. Each photograph offers a moment of proximity, inviting us to look more closely at the beings with whom we share the earth and to reflect on the responsibilities that arise from this coexistence.
Works forthcoming.
Us 小双16mm Bolex Short Film2022
Us explores the shifting boundary between the self we recognize and the roles we inhabit. Shawn frequently misplaces his belongings and buys replacements, only to rediscover the originals. As identical objects accumulate around him, an ordinary habit becomes increasingly unsettling—until he encounters another version of himself.
Through repetition and doubling, the film gives physical form to the tensions of adapting to social expectations. Its male and female protagonists embody different expressions of one person, revealing how identity can be concealed, divided, and performed. Beneath these overlapping selves lies a question: when we move between the people we are expected to become, what happens to the person we understand ourselves to be?
Mom’s Film Camera妈妈的胶片机Music Video2024
Directed by Deyi (Evelyn) Zeng, in collaboration with Echo Ding (Berklee College of Music) and dancers from Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
- Lyrics & Music
- Echo Ding
- Director & Videographer
- Deyi (Evelyn) Zeng
- Director of Photography & Editor
- Edison Gao
- Choreography
- Yulia Maeda, Sasha Powers, Sofia Pargas
Deyi Zeng
Deyi (Evelyn) Zeng (b. 2003) is a Chinese visual artist from Beijing based in Chicago. She received her BA in Media Arts Production from Emerson College and is pursuing an MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Through photography, installation, and archival materials, she examines how illness and migration affect a person’s sense of identity and home. Her work imagines a time before memory takes shape, when experiences the mind cannot recall may already have left their traces in the body.
Her work has been exhibited at Heaven Gallery and the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, the University of Arkansas School of Art in Fayetteville, Echo & Frame Art Space in Shanghai, and Beijing’s 798 Art District.
Curriculum vitae
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Based in Chicago, IL
