Tianhe Zhang/ Abandoned

Tianhe Zhang is a multidisciplinary photographer currently based in Beijing, China. Growing up at the foot of suburban mountains, she developed a lasting sensitivity to landscapes shaped by quiet transformation, abandonment, and human intervention.

Her current practice focuses on rural and suburban territories undergoing land acquisition and reconstruction in northern China. Through images of emptied fields, temporary barriers, and residual objects, her work observes landscapes suspenaded between disappearance and renewal.

Influenced by her background in product design, she approaches photography through restrained composition and careful spatial awareness, balancing documentary observation with subtle surrealism. Her images explore the tension between geometric order and the instability of lived environments.

Working across analogue film and Polaroid photography, she uses each medium to construct distinct relationships with time and memory. While her film photographs tend toward quiet observations of altered landscapes and social traces, her Polaroid works embrace softness, colour shifts, and material fragility, evoking images suspended between documentation and recollection.