Project Space Residency

Yanbin Zhao

February 10 – March 10, 2026

Artist statement

Zhao Yanbin is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice explores “distance” as both a conceptual and material condition—unfolding across temporal, spatial, and affective registers. Working with 16mm experimental film, video installation, performance, photography, and mixed media, Zhao examines the ruptures and entanglements that distance creates—across histories, geographies, and subjectivities. His work engages themes of labor, memory, language, and diaspora, often navigating the liminal space between the visible and the ineffable, the translated and the untranslatable.

Bio

Zhao holds an MFA in Film from California Institute of the Arts. His work has been presented at festivals including Image Forum Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, and at institutions such as LUX London, UCCA Edge Shanghai, REDCAT, and Los Angeles Filmforum. In 2024, he received the LACE Lightning Fund for emerging artists and was selected for the Visual Studies Workshop residency in Rochester, NY. He is the co-founder of 飞蚊 mosmote, a film collective dedicated to independent, experimental, and critically engaged cinema through screenings, workshops, and publishing initiatives.

VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something.