Forthcoming & Current

August 29–31, 2025
CROSSROADS Film Festival (screening), San Francisco, US

June 27 - October 7, 2025
Photographic Geomancy, group show at Fotografiska Shanghai, Shanghai (Curated by Yining He)

June 5 - 7, 2025
Besides the Screen 2025 (screening), University of Nottingham Ningbo, CN

December 4-7, 2024
Alternative Film Video 2024 (screening), New Belgrade

July 13 - October 7, 2024
Photographic Geomancy, group show at Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (Curated by Yining He)

“The ‘Photographic Geomancy’ exhibition examines the connections between Chinese contemporary art practices, local geographical knowledge, global ecological discourse, and artists’ embodied experiences in the field. This research-based exhibition features the works of 22 artists who use photography and video as primary mediums to reconstruct visual narratives with geography. Using "geomancy" as a metaphor, the exhibition demonstrates how artists respond to complex issues related to aesthetics, culture, ecology, and geopolitics associated with Chinese geography through the method of fieldwork.”

“The latter work, presented through video, depicts Ren’s experience of drifting along the West Coast of the United States during the pandemic. The coastline, in everyday perception, seems to be an external time gradually swaying toward stillness. However, in this essayistic film, such external time is forced to shift into an internal time measured by the individual life.” （Text by Qiuzi Guo）

May 3, 2024
14:30 – 16:00 / 67′ + Q&A
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (screening), Hawick

“Seven films sculpt meaning from the space between worlds – from the spiritual to the folkloric, the colonised to the diasporic, the meteoric to the transcendent.

In Coast to Coast (Preamble), Zeyuan Ren finds himself in active search of a narrative framework in which his longing for home can manifest: stranded as a Chinese international student on the USA’s west coast due to prohibitive quarantine measures during lockdown, he too communicates in dialogue – deploying a lyrical, second-person address to ruminate on liminality in the context of historical and geographic specificity.”

March 30 - April 28, 2024
Resilence, group show at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing

“Against the backdrop of continuous global turmoil, individuals and communities have been subjected to unprecedented spiritual and existential trials. In the face of such severe challenges, the artists explore with perseverance, open their inner worlds without reservation, and engage in positive dialogues while tearing themselves apart from the realities of the environment.”

September 30, 2023 – January 7, 2024
de Young Open 2023, group show at de Young Museum, San Francisco

August 4-24, 2023
RISD MFA Photography Class of 2023
Too Close, thesis group show at Microscope Gallery, New York (Curated by Thea Quiray Tagle)

“Navigating everything from the alienation inherent to online dating apps to meeting the demands of grueling graduate programs, younger artists have transmuted this general milieu of destabilization into their work – and the 2023 cohort of RISD MFA Photography graduates provides evidence of this. Self-selecting the words Too Close for the title of their New York group exhibition, these artists have each created bodies of work that oscillate between the polarities of distance and proximity, and linger in the tensions therein.

Moving through land- and seascapes differently, Zeyuan Ren’s Coast to Coast (Preamble) is an essayistic video installation on the artist’s temporary displacement from China to the US that uses the Sutro Bath Ruins in San Francisco as a place for self-reflection. As the crumbling remains of a pleasure site on the US Pacific Coast, this now-tourist attraction traffics in nostalgia for times past, in ways that allow the artist to (dis)identify with their own liminal position in the here and now.” (Text by Thea Quiray Tagle)

March 3-11, 2022 Couterpoints, group show at Red Eye Gallery, Providence (Curated by Kerr Cirilo, Kai Wasikowski)

“Maps cover the Earth’s surface in circular lines, allowing us to travel vast distances from point A to point B in minutes, hours or days. Point maps plot data to visualize locations in space. A mapped point is identified by either a value or a subject. These positioning systems established accurate degrees of longitude by recording the timing of simultaneous lunar eclipses from two different locations. Mapping, in this sense, was realized through separation and defined by distance. Knowing where you are demands a conscious orientation toward where you are not. Systems of points and counterpoints are realized through triangulated acts of recording.”

April 10 - June 26, 2021The Journey from/to Here: Residencies at Gazetteer-Novel at Jiazazhi Library, Ningbo (Curated by Fen Lei)

“If ‘being present’ represents perspectives, encompassing the physical, experiential, mnemonic, and emotional realms, then 'journeying afar' embodies techniques, ranging from writing, drawing, audiovisuals, to lens-based arts. Every day, people are intertwining their lives into the multifaceted perspectives and multiple techniques, actively participating in and shaping the present.”

Zeyuan Ren

Wayfinding to the Past Coast to Coast (Preamble)

Thus Waves Come to You

A Kind of Displacement

Have You Been Here

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Wayfinding to the Past
Coast to Coast (Preamble)