West Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Mia Zheng

Saturday, November 08, 2025 @ 2:20pm,

Presence: The Shape of Chaos

Mia Zheng (born in 1994, China) is a conceptual visual artist whose work explores and experiments with the relationships across and among beings. Her discipline expands on filmmaking, photography, typography, linguistics, and performance art. She loves finding and contemplating perspectives in different places.

Mia's practice often navigates the intersection of photography, sculpture, and conceptual art. With a background rooted in travel and cultural observation, her work uses the photographic medium not merely to document, but to question the act of perception itself. Drawing from everyday encounters and ephemeral arrangements, she constructs sculptural compositions that explore balance, impermanence, and the psychology of stillness. Objects in her work become metaphors, and space is treated not just as a backdrop, but as an active participant in meaning-making. Her photographs contain layered meanings: combining material presence with conceptual absence to viewers to contemplate what lies just beyond the frame.

Mia's interdisciplinary approach is deeply informed by global movement and multilingual curiosity. Having traveled to over 30 countries, Mia's visual language reflects a sensitivity to the ordinary, the poetic, and the overlooked. Her work investigates the harmony between chaos and order, stillness and movement, solitude and connection--finding meaning in the visual fragments of life.

Mia Zheng received her BA in Directing in Film Production from Emerson College in 2016 and is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.