p r a x i s
I make myths. Through them, reality is made, unmade, and remade. These narrative meta-structures shape the self, braid past, present and future, and bind us to each other and the world.
My practice began in personal mythology — interrogating memory, testing it, rewriting it. That inquiry scaled outward. A city’s myth. Then, as ghost of a world yet to be, the ancient idea of Nusantara and the current Southeast Asian imaginary interwoven with anthropocenic anxiety and alternate futures we might yet inhabit.
Process-wise, I straddle the digital, the mechanical and the handmade, each with its own capacity for error, revision and accumulation, like the myths themselves.
Complexity is more than style. It is method: Entangled dualities, quantum and superstring theories, Halberstam’s “silly archive” — frameworks that let contradiction sit unresolved.
Threading through these, an abiding scepticism of memory’s reliability explored through an ongoing parallel body of work.
w o r k s
7 elements >
topologies of loss >
naming our bright & dark stars >
the city & the city >
twilight states >
new flesh >
stygian suite >
a b o u t
Ren Zi was conceptualised in 2004, though it took nine years — and a Kickstarter campaign — for their first public showcase to materialise, in 2013.
Their practice interrogates how myth shapes the perception of reality, on both the individual and societal scale — rooted in philosophical idealism, the Taoist concept of entangled dualities and a transgression of Jack Halberstam’s “silly archive.” Feeding the work: Folktale and speculative fiction, mecha anime and spandex-hero exploits, Asian melodrama and a syncretic amalgam of Buddhism, Catholicism and socialism absorbed in their formative years.
Having assumed the mantle of ghost of a world yet to be, Ren Zi’s current focus explores alternate realities against the Nusantara concept and the wider Southeast Asian imaginary.
An autodidact, they credit their art education to Art for Dummies and YouTube — though given the mythopoeic nature of the practice, the veracity of that claim should be taken with some scepticism.
c o n t a c t
For curatorial, acquisition or commission enquiries, email reach.renzi@gmail.com.
For brand and commercial collaborations, I’m represented by GroundFire. Contact Michelle Lim at michelle@groundfire.live.