Yumoi Zheng 郑有妹

Yumoi Zheng 郑有妹 is a transfeminine artist working across poetry, performance, installation, fashion and video. She was born in Zhanjiang, China and moved to Pōneke Wellington at age 15 to study, going on to work as a facilitator at Play_station after graduating from university. Zheng explores the intricacies of her own identities through her creative practice, in which she talks about being apart from her family, growth, loneliness, blessings and the secretive nature of memories.

Her solo show, talk soon xxx, at Play_station in 2023 was “a collection of memories of sisterhood and extension of self-expression” using her phone. At the entrance, a screen recording of video calls with her family and sisters was displayed on a small screen. In a conversation about the show, Zheng said: “My family and I communicate through a small mobile phone screen, and we are in two different spaces where we can show and disguise our different selves”.

In the centre of the space, a white circular projection illuminated a red roast duck, projecting text that featured her past names, cities she has lived in and emojis of devils and angels. At the very centre was the text, “a faggot, a tranny”, and the question, “God! Are you still watching me and blessing me?”

The moving image work, Phone note poetry, incorporated footage Zheng had filmed and manipulated overlaid with spontaneous notes written with her phone: a “gentle, brutal, soft and hard hitting” poem about gender, families, friends and the ocean.

Writing about the exhibition, Angel C Fitzgerald said, “talk soon xxx kind of feels like a mirror, maybe I mean a portal. [...] When people have asked me what the show is about I keep saying “it's Yumoi introducing herself”. I think at a surface level I can see that, but once I’m standing in the space, it’s a lot more complex than this. It’s deeply personal. It features footage of her family - both blood and chosen. It features poetry from her phone notes. I feel like I’m inside her brain. Like she’s reading me her diary.”

Zheng moved back to China in 2023.