Artist from China
Anna Zhang is a New York–based fashion designer, graphic designer, and visual artist, and the Founder and Creative Director of ANNA.Z, an independent multidisciplinary studio bridging fashion, visual art, and moving image. Her work spans textile experimentation, digital imagery, and installation-based narratives, with a focus on emotional resonance and material language across physical and digital media.
Anna holds a Master’s degree in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design and currently works as a Designer at CALVIN KLEIN DRESS and DONNA KARAN DRESS New York, alongside her independent practice. Her creative projects under ANNA.Z have been presented during New York Fashion Week, where she has showcased conceptual installations integrating graphics, cinematic visuals, and sculptural garments. Her video works have also been exhibited in SoHo, New York, reflecting her ongoing exploration of spatial and film-based storytelling.
She has received multiple international recognitions, including the American Good Design Award, MUSE Design Award, and French Fashion Award.
Working across fashion, graphic design, and film-based media, Zhang investigates contemporary form, narrative structure, and the intersection of technology and craft.
ARTWORK STATEMENT
TO YOU, AFTER ALL TIME is an immersive film reflecting on memory after the loss of a loved one. Through recurring visual cycles of melting and growth, the work traces an emotional process between forgetting and remembering, loss and healing. The animation translates grief into an evolving visual language, where transformation becomes a form of remembrance.
CRITICAL REVIEW: The short animated film TO YOU, AFTER ALL TIME explores grief as an open, non-linear process in which memory and loss coexist in a state of continuous transformation. Through visual cycles of melting and regeneration, the animation translates pain into a fluid material, rejecting any sense of definitive closure.
Transformation thus becomes both the language and the structure of the work: shifting forms embody the way memory operates over time, reshaping the identity of those who remain. Grief is not overcome, but absorbed, becoming part of an emotional balance in constant evolution.
In this poetic suspension, the short animated film TO YOU, AFTER ALL TIME affirms vulnerability as a creative force and opens an individual experience onto a universal dimension, in which change emerges as a necessary gesture of resilience and renewal. – Dr. Carmela Loiacono, Art Curator
more. annazofficial.cargo.site | CV – ARTIST
INTERVIEW with Anna Zhang
Carmela Loiacono talks with Anna Zhang who took part in the International Art Exhibition NEW HORIZONS – Authenticity, Resilience and Renewal in Matera, at Casa Cava, from March 21 to 27, 2026.
Carmela Loiacono – In TO YOU, AFTER ALL TIME, the continuous cycle of melting and regrowth visualizes the process of grief. How did you find a balance between representing a deeply personal loss and creating a universal language that can speak to anyone?
Anna Zhang – I chose not to tell a specific story, but to translate the feeling of grief into a visual system—its repetition, instability, and transformation. By using abstract processes like melting and regrowth, the work leaves space for viewers to project their own experiences. That distance allows something deeply personal to become universally relatable.
Carmela Loiacono – The animation transforms pain into fluid visual matter. Can you share how your choices in movement, color, and rhythm helped shape such an intimate experience?
Anna Zhang – I treated the animation as a living system. Forms continuously change but never fully return, reflecting how grief evolves. The color palette is restrained and gradual, while the rhythm moves between stillness and slow transformation—almost like breathing—making the experience feel intimate rather than overwhelming.
Carmela Loiacono – Memory in your work emerges as an ever-evolving element. Looking back on the creative process of this video, how has the work transformed your own personal understanding of loss and remembrance?
Anna Zhang – It shifted my view of grief from something to resolve into something to live with. Memory became less fixed and more fluid—constantly reshaped over time. The process helped me accept that loss doesn’t disappear, it transforms and stays with us in different ways.
Carmela Loiacono – What future directions or projects do you envision for your video and animation practice, and how do you plan to continue exploring emotional transformation through new visual languages?
Anna Zhang – I’m interested in expanding into installations and interactive systems, where viewers can physically engage with these transformations. I’m also exploring AI and simulation as tools to build new visual languages—less about representing emotion, and more about letting people experience it through change and time.
